Economy of Romania

Prime Minister Viorica Dancila on Wednesday stated that the Government wants a real strategic partnership with the large companies wanting to invest in Romania, and that in a short while it will launch the state aid scheme for private investments larger than 10 million euros, for opening of expanding production capacity.

The Romanian economy advanced 4 percent in the first quarter of 2018 in unadjusted terms and 4.2 percent when seasonally adjusted, as against the same period of 2017, according to first estimates released on Tuesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INS).

A Romanian court jailed business tycoon Sorin Ovidiu Vantu for 10 years and six months on Thursday for embezzling funds from the Petromservice oil company employees association during 2005 and 2006.

The potential risk of commencing an investigation in the Competition Council concerning the tariff scheme must disappear, and on the General Assembly's agenda of next week there will be a cancellation of the decision to review the scheme, Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB) CEO Adrian Tanase said in an interview for AGERPRES.

Half of Romania's stock indices rose b y more than 8% since the beginning of the year, and the BET, which shows the trend of the 13 most traded companies on the regulated market of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB), rose by 8.49%.

With an advance of 7 percent in Q 4 2017 compared to the similar period of 2016, Romania saw the fastest annual GDP growth in the EU for the interval October - December 2017, shows an Eurostat flash estimate released this Wednesday.

Romanian companies must be encouraged to acquire competitors from other countries, for right now there is a fiscal discrimination between financing through banking loan and new bonds issues, says Lucian Anghel, head of the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB).

Eurobank will maintain its Balkan footprint in Bulgaria, Serbia and Cyprus after pulling out of Romania, its deputy CEO said on Tuesday, expecting the group's subsidiaries there to double their profitability over the next few years.

In its January 2018 Global Economic Prospects report, the World Bank forecasts Serbia's GDP growth in 2018 to be three percent.

The June 2017 report had put the figure at 3.5 percent.

The World Bank now says that in 2019 and 2020, Serbia will have GDP growth rates of 3.5 and 4 percent.

Turkey received almost $8.3 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) in the first 10 months of the year, a drop of nearly 17 percent year-on-year, the Economy Ministry said on Dec. 21.