PNL's Citu: Economy grows, we need political maturity to maintain positive trend

Romania's economy grows, the general economic parameters are improving, and now we only need political maturity to support the positive trend, said interim Prime Minister Florin Citu, PNL (National Liberal Party) leader, agerpres reports.

"I promised in the beginning of the year that we will have a record economic growth and a small budget deficit after increasing budget revenues, without increasing the taxes and by controlling budget expenditure. And we did it. Budget execution after nine months shows that we have put Romania's economy on the right track, despite the various turbulences that the country is facing," Florin Citu said, on Wednesday, in a post on Facebook.

The interim PM added that, during this period, the Executive has managed to reduce the budget deficit by 2.6 percentage points of GDP compared to the same period last year.

"We made this adjustment by managing both to increase revenues and cut expenditures, while making exceptional payments of 10.4 billion lei generated by the COVID-19 epidemic. In a period of pandemic that continued to affect economic activities, we recorded an increase in budget revenues by 1.4 percentage points of GDP compared to the first 9 months of last year, only through voluntary compliance and absorption of European funds. The budget revenues increased by a net 42.6 billion lei compared to 2020, and by 41.7 billion lei compared to 2019. At the same time, in January-September we decreased budget expenditures by 1.2 percentage points of GDP compared to the same period last year, but managed to increase investments by 3.9 billion lei compared to the similar period of 2020, and by 10.8 billion lei compared to the similar period of 2019," said Citu.

He also mentioned the amounts allocated to investments.

"As we promised and as we had in the budget, 53.6pct of the total investment expenditures were represented by projects financed from European funds, an amount by 5.69 billion lei higher than in the first 9 months of last year," stated Florin Citu.