Prime minister Ilie Bolojan announced on July 2 that the government would come up with a second package of measures by the end of the month to promote important reforms such as changes to special pensions – a milestone in the National Programme for Recovery and Resilience PNRR – the reorganization of public institutions and state-owned companies, the reduction of subsidies, as well as the phasing off of some bonuses in the budgetary sector.
However, PM Bolojan himself said this second package may be passed by the Parliament “later during the autumn,” and the calendar turned uncertain after finance minister Alexandru Nazare explained that structural reforms such as those included in the package take two to three months to complete and Bolojan’s advisor Ionut Dumitru admitted that some of them (such as cutting the “special pensions”) are particularly complicated.
“In the second stage, by the end of July, we will come up with measures related to several very important elements related to special pensions, the reform of self-financed institutions – Financial Supervisory Authority ASF, telecom market regulator ANCOM, energy market regulator ANRE – the reform of state-owned companies for more efficient spending, the reduction of subsidies and ensuring their transparency and performance, the reform of spending at the local public administration level and the bonuses in the budgetary sector,” the prime minister stated in the press conference in which he announced the first fiscal package that comes into force on August 1, Spotmedia.ro reported.
He also said that the second package aims to meet milestones that are mandatory in order to absorb European funds and also to correct injustices and negative accumulations.
“Romanians should see that we are not just administering, but correcting things, to generate trust, to put Romania back on the right track and to restore the trust and hope of citizens,” he added.
The prime minister announced that the second package of reforms could be approved by assuming responsibility in the summer and, if not, at the latest in the fall, emphasizing that “the sooner we adopt it, the better it is for Romania.”
More recently, finance minister Alexandru Nazare stated on July 4 that the reorganization of institutions and agencies that will be included in the second package of measures to reduce the deficit will take two to three months, given that their efficiency needs to be improved.
“The second package was announced for this summer by prime minister Ilie Bolojan. Here, we have to be very honest and direct with people. Any reorganization that is done according to the book takes two to three months each. Plus, we have to think very carefully about how to carry out the reorganisation, not in the sense of actually closing them down, but in the sense of streamlining the respective authorities, institutions, agencies. We no longer need some of them, we need some of them in a completely different form, others can be merged. That is, we need a vision at the end of which we will have a much more efficient and flexible state,” the minister of finance said in an interview for Antena 1, as reported by B1tv.ro.
iulian@romania-insider.com
(Photo source: Gov.ro)
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