Presidential adviser says Parliament ought to provide Romania with credible budget built on solid bases

Presidential adviser Cosmin Marinescu on Friday said Parliament ought to provide Romania with a credible, well-founded national budget, built on solid bases that will not burden up the Romanians' economic future and that will guarantee stability, predictability and prosperity for all Romanians in the years to come according to Agerpres.

At a news briefing at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace, he criticised the fact that the 2019 national budget under the ceiling regulations, provides for structural adjustments only in 2021, "which indicates that the Government, missing solutions, keeps postponing its pledged commitments.".

"Regarding the budget deficit, the budget bill ignores a number of provisions in the Fiscal-Budgetary Responsibility Law, those on the medium-term budgetary objective, those concerning the measures to be taken in case of temporary deviations of the deficit, as is currently the case with Romania. The deficit ratio of 2.76pct of the GDP, shows that the adjustment against the year 2018 is practically non-existent. That violates the EU recommendation of November 27, 2018, referring to the procedure of significant deviation of the public deficit, a recommendation stipulating a structural adjustment of 1pct of the GDP in 2019," Marinescu said.

He also criticised the appropriations for the social protection system.

"The 2019 budget bill provides for a fundamental change, it is a governmental scheming regarding the funding of the child protection system, centres for people with disabilities and the system for the protection of people with disabilities. All these social services were transferred from the national budget to the budgets of the local administrations. The government's scheming means an extra bill of about 2.5 billion lei to be footed by the local public administrations from their own revenues, money that could have been used for investment and for the development of local communities," Marinescu said.

In his opinion, the social security services transferred to the local administrations requires expenditures of about 6.5 billion lei in 2019 nationwide. "Under the budget bill, the funding sources are made up of Value Added Tax (VAT) revenues for balancing local budgets and own revenues of the local administrations, but VAT rebalancing amounts for 2019 increase by only 4 billion lei compared with the previous year," Marinescu added.