Financial Press Review, 25 February

The Curierul Naţional opens with the headline "Popular riots shake financial markets."

The recent riots in North Africa and the Middle East have caused the price of oil to "reach the highest level in the last two and a half years".

"Crude-oil boom – inflation" reads a Bursa headline. Still, "grain quotations were until recently considered the main cause of the grain price rise", the article reads.

The reason: "higher power costs will affect the expansion of the economy and the grain demand. (…) But this doesn"t mean that the price of wheat in the Romanian storehouse will fall", Emilia Olescu stated for the Bursa.

"We have to align to the prices abroad."

"We will only have cheaper wheat if the state subsidizes the price of bread", the daily quotes Robert Arsene, general manager at Agricover Group.

The Ziarul Financiar prints an article entitled "Food prices increased 20-40 percent in eight months." The number – which concerns flour, sugar, oil and potatoes – was calculated by the daily based on the prices in the Bucharest supermarkets.

Under the headline "Unemployment rate fell in January, reaching the level from before the meltdown", the Ziarul Financiar reveals a paradox: "unemployment rate has fallen for ten months in a row, when the state alone announced 100, 000 layoffs".

"The announced fall only confirms what analysts and economists have been saying all along: the statistics from the National Agency for Employment do not show the real unemployment rate".

There are "5 million people able to work about whom nobody knows what they are doing". Under the headline "Customs anticorruption Part 2: vegetables and fruit", the Curierul Naţional comments on the prosecutors" and police officers" raid at the Ploieşti customs yesterday.

"This time investigators were not aiming at cigarette smuggling, but at bribe in order to turn a blind eye to irregularities committed by representatives of companies that import and export vegetables and fruit".

The investigations "show what the common folk has known for a long time now: all the structures in the state are corrupted, and the bribe (even though not claimed from the very beginning, is requested by employees in order to sort out situations) is proportional to the size of the request".

The same daily, Curierul Naţional, comments on the public debate on the amendments of the Labour Code, in an attempt to answer the question "Who and why is dissatisfied with the new Code?". The article's title: "Let"s not throw stones at the Labour Code."

In an article, the Curierul Naţional addresses a series of proposals on the healthcare reform in Romania.

"Right now, over 20 million people use state healthcare, but only 4.3 million Romanians pay taxes for them. Moreover, some Romanians are forced to contribute to the healthcare system, but use private healthcare – either by health insurance or on their own when they have health problems".

The healthcare system would develop if private insurance policies were encouraged.

Privatization is indeed a solution, but both state and private hospitals should exist.

Translated by: Gabriela Lungu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University