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Analysis: Record number of employees in Romania on fast economic growth
Romania posted 4.902 million employees in companies with at least four workers in February, a record high of the last two decades, as fast economic growth creates jobs and reduces unemployment, business-review.eu informs.
According to a recent report of the National Institute of Statistics (INS), the number of employees in the economy rose by 108,000 between February 2017 and February 2018, as Romania’s GDP increased by 6.9 percent last year, a record-high since 2008.
But the real number of employees is much higher, as the official statistics include only companies with four employees and over – representing 90.7 percent of total employees in this sector – and exclude armed forces and similar staff (Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Internal Affairs or intelligence services.
A separate report released by INS said that the total number of employees in Romania reached 6.39 million in 2017, up from 6.201 million in 2016.
These data include military personnel and assimilated and the Romanians working in informal sector and in underground economy.
But more than 44 percent of the Romania’s employees received the national minimum wage in March 2018, compared with 37 percent in 2017, according to official data obtained by Business Review.
Unions say this evolution is a consequence of government’s lack of interest for an equitable distribution of benefits of economic growth.
On March 31, 6.28 million contracts of indeterminate duration were registered in Revisal, Romania’s employment register, out of which 2,775,545 (or 44.2 percent) were minimum gross national wage-contracts (RON 1,900 or EUR 408).
Revisal also registers around 222,000 fixed term employment contracts.
Historically, the highest number of employees in Romania was recorded at the end of the communist regime, when more than 8 million individuals were considered “employees”, many of them working in large, obsolete and poor productivity factories.
During the last three decades, Romanian economy experienced a huge restructuring process, moving towards a service-based economy.
In 1990, around 3.5 million Romanian worked in the industry sector, compared with 1.39 million in February 2018.
But the new high value added – and high wages – sectors like IT and communications have more than 170,000 employees in Romania, compared with only thousands during the communist regime.