Think-tank: Romanian Govt.’s EUR 10 bln investment plan is “helicopter money”

The procedures that regulate the Government’s EUR 10 bln investment plan (2022-2028) incorporates in its final form several improvement suggestions submitted by civic organisations, but it did not address the big issue that consists in the problematic money allocation procedure.

Ambiguous procedures and the lack of a transparent and predictable algorithm for money allocation makes the Government’s program “worse than the Social Democrats’ PNDL1 and PNDL2,” Expert-Forum (EFOR) think-tank concludes, after reviewing the official documents.

The improvements acknowledged by EFOR include the development of a platform for program management, procedures for intermediary publication of data, the introduction of program monitoring indicators, setting in place of mechanisms for abandoning idle projects, and procedures for charging fines when needed.

EFOR notes a lack of clarity in regard to these positive developments, as well.

Nevertheless, the big issue highlighted by EFOR remains the lack of clear procedures for allocating the money.

The provision promising a certain amount of money per county/municipality/village seems to be aimed at “making everybody happy” rather than a procedure providing equal opportunities to all local administration entities. Such algorithms should have taken in indicators such as population, entity’s financial strength, the number of projects already carried on under PNDL, the number of residents that would benefit from the project, and other indicators provided by the statistics office INS, EFOR explains.

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