Romanian PM says pensions will rise next year

Romania’s new prime minister Ludovic Orban said on Wednesday, November 27, that the pensions “will increase next year” and the budget planning, to be drafted during the coming couple of weeks, will factor in the necessary expenditures.

"Currently, there is a law in force that we intend to apply. In fact, it is not even likely that the Parliament will change the law during an election year (...) Having a law in force, normally the pension should increase,” Orban confirmed without however mentioning directly the 40% hike stipulated by the law. “We will build the budget project taking this hike into account,” Orban added, quoted by Mediafax.

His statements come after the chief economist of Romania’s National Bank (BNR), Valentin Lazea, spoke on the same day about the impact that the pension law will have on the state budget in the coming years.

Lazea proposed to cut down the 40% hike scheduled for September 2020 to “several percentage points” and he claims that this would not require amending the law that “anyway is scheduled to come into force in September 2021.”

Indeed, the hikes in September 2019 and September 2020 are designed to prepare the enforcement of a thoroughly reviewed public pension system, after the pensions are correlated and brought up to a decent level.

(Photo: Gov.ro)