Europe after the crisis

The economical logics forces Romania to urgently solve a big problem: competitiveness. This is because the top of competitiveness, before the global financial crisis, doesn’t offer Romania a honorable place. The solution: fast moves. I

The economical logics forces Romania to urgently solve a big problem: competitiveness. This is because the top of competitiveness, before the global financial crisis, doesn’t offer Romania a honorable place. The solution: fast moves. I do not know what place we will occupy in the years after the crisis. But, if we care of our future in the European Union, we should consider a few points:
1) getting profit from volume, not from the margin;
2) focusing competitiveness on quality and in-time deliveries instead of paying so much attention to the costs;
3) a greater concern for the continuous improvement of the workforce;
4) the formation of a class of managers able to cope with the requirements of competitiveness.

Obviously, a cardinal importance in this regard is attracting a large part of the resources made available for us by the European Union. We can succeed with infrastructure, environment and rural development projects.

However, at this moment, Romania needs a medium and long-term vision. It needs a program to ensure the certain performances in the economy, targeting mostly the reduction of the public deficit, the drastic restriction of the share of the state in industry, which should be added to the consistent economic growth and decrease in inflation. If some hard exams (like the increase in productivity and efficiency, the decrease in bureaucracy, contractual discipline, payment strategy) will be passed, the mentioned targets could be reached. This way, Romania will acquire a market economy that will be not only functional but also able to cope with the pressures of the European Union competitiveness.

Europe itself will change. Romania will need a program like the one in 2000, right after the negotiations for the adherence. The government passed an important exam at that time, by supporting its Development Strategy on medium term.

In fact, it presented a program. An excellent summary of a few tens of thousands of pages of strategies from political parties, trade unions, employers, universities, research institutions. After that, they gathered approximately 1,500 experts from the government, parties, trade unions and employers, the Romanian Academy, most of them representatives of the civil society, in a debate that lasted a few months. This project has received in the end the blessing of the religious cults that signed a support statement. Everybody saw then, in the early 2000, how difficult it is for our society to find points of consensus, to negotiate with groups dominated by various interests. However, it was worth the effort. Skeptical, those who have seen the Development strategy only as a formality required by the European Union, with goals that will never be fulfilled, can see know that they were wrong. Everything that was foreseen, took place: the decrease in the inflation, the economical growth of more than 5 percent, the fiscal deficits within the requirements of the European Union.

The adherence program was a success. Why wouldn’t it be followed now by a program for European integration developed in the same style?