Financial Press Review, 20 May

The chances of the economic recovery is the central topic in today's financial press.

The Ziarul Financiar opened with an overview of the conclusions of a seminar held yesterday on the theme ‘We are out of recession. What’s the plan for the future? When will Romania feel the taste of increase again?’

As an attendant of the seminar, President Traian Băsescu said yesterday that the VAT increase was ‘a political error that delayed the emergence of recession for at least six months’, both the Curierul Naţional and the Bursa reported.

‘Romanians must be dismiss the myth according to which inflation leads to growth. Inflation is a major threat to economic growth’, both the Ziarul Financiar and the Bursa quoted Adrian Vasilescu, adviser of the NBR governor.

Several attendants at the seminar stressed the need to simplify the administrative labyrinth, plus the need for a predictable and stable fiscal policy.

’What foreign investors save in Romania by cheap labor, they lose in the infrastructure and logistics cost,’ financial advisor Iulian Sorescu pointed out.

The Ziarul Financiar covered this story in an article: ‘At least 10 percent of the products on the shelves of stores in Romania are the costs of logistics (transport and storage), compared to the 4-6 percent in the Netherlands or France.’

‘These high costs are caused by the poor infrastructure, but also by the large chain of intermediaries which interposes between the producing company and the store shelf.’

Most producing or importing companies from Romania deal with transport and logistics alone, but the distribution network of many of them are not very effective and determine the price increases of the products on the shelves.

‘Only 8 percent of firms on the Romanian market have outsourced transport and logistics activities, compared to 80 percent in France.’

Under the title ‘Ford Craiova Chief, dissatisfied by workers’, the Ziarul Financiar wrote: ‘The car plant in Craiova fails to achieve the quality target set by the Americans from Ford’, according to the Spanish newspaper Las Provincias, which quoted Jan Gijsen, CEO of Ford Romania.

‘The high level of adjustments that need to be made on the assembly line in Romania slows the production planning at European level,’ according to the Spanish newspaper.

‘The company still runs training programs in order to achieve quality standards at Ford Motor Company worldwide’, the article noted.

The Ziarul Financiar presented in an article the conclusions of a debate held yesterday at Constanţa on attraction and use of funds.

One of the conclusions was actually expressed in the title: ‘We need a black list of the consulting firms writing ineligible projects, those who took EU funds said.’

‘If you do not have any knowledge of writing projects, hire a consultant who does’, a participant of the debate recommended, while noting that there is a shortage of such staff, which massively migrated to the private sector. ‘One solution could be unlocking the positions.’

‘Romania - a country without cadastre’ an article in the Bursa was titled, in which we read that potential investors do not run any business in our agricultural sector because, for most agricultural land, there are no equities.

The statement, made ​​yesterday at a specialized seminar belonged to Theodor Stolojan. ‘We need a grant to the pricing of their grain’, the former presidential adviser added to his statement from the Bursa.

We yet do not have any medium or long term strategy to attract the European funding for the agricultural development in general, MEP Viorica Dăncilă said at the seminar, pointing out that ‘Romanian villages and farmers are the poorest in Europe.’

Translated by: Iulia Florescu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University