Pension expenditures lead Romania into crisis

Addressing leading trade union representatives, Romanian Prime Minister Emil Boc defended his plans for strict austerity measures on Thursday. The daily Gândul draws attention in this context to the country's costly pension system: "The drop in pension revenues coupled with the rise in expenditures has created huge problems for the pension system. This is not only because the population has not stopped ageing, but also because workers have emigrated and the number of people taking early retirement has increased. The negative impact of mismanagement after 1990 was presumably worse than the three other factors taken together. ... On the other hand, the most important lesson to be learned from the current crisis is that rather than giving people something you're not in a position to give and then obliging them to give it back, it's better to not pay it out in the first place. But in a Kafkaesque democracy like Romania blending rhetoric, demagogy and crude populism it's hard to imagine that the political class will learn anything at all from this lesson."

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