National Press Review, 3 August

"Who will they sacrifice: state or private employees?". This is the question in capital letters on the front page of the România liberă.

The daily starts its analysis by underlying that "The Government does not have enough money to both raise the salaries of the state employees and reduce the health insurance contribution.
Financially speaking, the wisest decision would be to reduce the health insurance contribution since it would increase the employment rate in the private sector, as well as investment and consumption levels.

The financial experts interviewed by the România Liberă stated that considering the "convalescence" phase that the entire world was going through, the best advice would be "not to overdo it" in order to avoid certain risks. Neither the reduction in the health insurance contribution not the increase in the salaries of the state employees seems to be the right measure to reflect caution.

However, yesterday President Traian Băsescu stated on Radio Romania that the Government should give priority to increasing the salaries of the state employees, emphasising that a reduced tax system could barely be established.

The Ziarul Financiar quotes from the same interview that the president granted the public radio station: From "we were on the verge of bankruptcy" to "we are still walking on a mine field".

The president repeated yesterday what he had already said at the meeting with the International Monetary Fund: the salaries of the state employees cannot be increased in 2011, but he promised that more efforts would be made to solve the problem the following year, when elections would be held. He also announced that some state companies would be left to go into bankruptcy for not paying their debts.

The president added that "Romania is doing better than Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Greece in terms of macroeconomic balance and need for a loan.

The Adevărul analyses the real economy and notices that "Companies have emerged from recession only partially". The main parameters of the economic evolution are more promising on paper, in the government statistics than they did before the crisis.

For businessmen the production and the order rate are on the increase this year comparing to 2010, but the financial meltdown is interfering with their plans and they cannot afford to hire new people. Surviving is the main target.

The private sector is still struggling with the costs imposed by the Government in 2009. When the crisis began, the Government increased expenses of employment by force and introduced new costs that no longer are tax-deductible.

The number of employees has been constantly dropping since 2008. The only real measure aimed at the private sector that was applied in 2010 and no longer can be applied in 2011 consisted in the non-taxation of the 75 percent salary paid to the people whose employment contracts had been suspended.

But the crisis is most reflected in the dramatic drop of consumption. Therefore, traders have the hardest time in getting back on their feet. The constant increase in food prices has pushed clients away and important hypermarket chains that invaded Romania several years ago have been losing great amounts of money because of the consumption reduction.

"Foreign tourists spend on accommodation in Romania the turnover of a shopping center", the Ziarul Financiar writes, making an objective analysis based on the figures the Romanian tourism industry has been reaching so far due to foreign tourists.

The tourism sector, often described in political speeches as a good opportunity for Romania to stand out, has helped our country earn more than one million euro due to only 22 000 foreign tourists that have spent at least one night in a Romanian resort.

Also the total revenue from accommodating foreign tourists in hotels, pensions or villas in important cities that support the Romanian tourism amounted to 170-175 million euro last year, a level similar to the turnover of the most important Romanian commercial center, AFI Palace Cotroceni in Bucharest.

And since we are speaking about tourism, the Jurnalul Naţional is "Following steps of Dacians and Romans" and underlines that the antique fortress Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa is not on the UNESCO World Heritage list like Sarmizegetusa Regia.

This explains why the Minister of Culture has not allocated funds and the Minister of Tourism has other priorities. History lies covered with weed. The local and county authorities are not expending much effort on it either. Instead, the old city has been deprived of everything that could be stolen.

It has been largely destroyed. Although excavations in the Roman Sarmizegetusa have been made for the last 120 years, they have managed to discover only 15 percent of what has been lying there for over two thousand years! According to archeologists, they have barely dug up the centre of the 40-hectare colony.

Finally, we turn our attention on an article published by the Evenimentul Zilei about the "Dangers that a Facebook user is facing".

Breaking into an account on a social network is no mission impossible for a hacker. According to experts, the people who reveal too much personal information on the social networks are facing different risks such as identity theft and becoming a target for sexual predators.

People have to limit their actions on the internet and interact with contacts they completely trust and post less personal information on the internet, no matter what platform they use.

Translated by: Raluca Mizdrea
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University