INACO's Andreea Paul: Operating budget, not development one, it completely lacks human perspective

The current year budget is an operating not a development one, and it completely lacks the human perspective, chairwoman of the Competitiveness Initiative (INACO) Andreea Paul stated in a debate about the budget on Tuesday. "The human perspective is completely missing from this solely operating budget. All the macroeconomic parameters on which we build the budget of this factory called Romania can experience extraordinary setbacks, if we do not attack the biggest problem we have: we are living today the strongest human crisis, and it is reflected in the industry, it is reflected in education, it is reflected in public administration, in all spheres of daily life. Romania's budget should have been a development budget. Why did we not have a very serious public debate about the national programme of reforms and investments? Because this is where I would have liked the tailoring of an educated Romania budget, a development budget, had really started. As such, we have neither a budget of the country project called 'Educated Romania', nor a green budget, a digitalization budget, a budget to transform our economy into a knowledge-based one," said Andreea Paul. The INACO chairwoman appreciated that Romania currently has to manage the bankruptcy of the education and health systems. "Why do I touch on this aspect of the human crisis? Because today we are witnessing the fruits of what we have not done in the past. And I wouldn't want to be part of the generation of economists who are witnessing another wave of inactivity and to reap the same result in 10-20-30 years. Today, we have to deal with a real bankruptcy of the school and the health system alike.Why do macroeconomic parameters lack human data related to the quality of life, such as for example, the 1 million students without a Baccalaureate or 1 in 4 young people between the ages of 20 and 34 who are graduates of various studies who are unemployed? Or why one in four children between the ages of 7 and 9 is obese and overweight? Namely, why are we not addressing to the root causes? Because this is how the burdening with spending, waste, inefficiency in budget allocations, in these two key areas is justified. I have a very serious estimate: by 2030 a number of 500,000 children between 5 and 19 years will suffer from obesity, in the absence of some interventions," stated Andreea Paul. In her opinion, Romania's serious competitiveness problems are caused by the human crisis and not by infrastructure or public administration. "We can take similar examples in relation to the environment or in any area of economic competitiveness where the burden pulls all productivity indicators down. In all new global competitiveness reports, today we are much worse off in terms of human crisis indicators than in the area of public administration or the precarious infrastructure we are already used to "brag about". That's how today we have come to rank first in Europe in terms of school drop-out and among the last in PISA tests, to have the lowest employability rates of young graduates in Europe, to have Romanians with the least physical activity among adults. These are basic things, but this is the root cause of the problem, namely the quality of people's lives," Andreea Paul argued.AGERPRES(RO - author: George Coman, editor: Oana Tilica; EN - author: Simona Iacb, editor: Maria Voican)

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