T. Basescu: Austerity measures, a must when a government destroys a country’s macroeconomic balance

“One thing that seemed extremely important to me is that we all agreed that we are now in a post-crisis situation and that we need to find solutions for growth. I find it is highly important to make this point about the crisis, austerity, growth, and job creation. The theory emerged lately at European level that we don’t need austerity, that there are other solutions for macroeconomic rebalancing than austerity. I think these approaches are wrong, that they only delay the return to the macroeconomic balances allowing the real relaunch of sustainable economic growth. It’s clear that the austerity measures are necessary when, following political errors or out of political demagogy, a government destroys the country’s macroeconomic balance and rebalancing cannot be done otherwise but by reached austerity measures duly set in place, taken in all seriousness and resoluteness, in such a way that the period of austerity be as short as possible,” Basescu declared at the 18th Central Europe Summit of Heads of State on the “Growth Strategy for Post-crisis Recovery’ held in Bratislava, the Slovak Republic.

Basescu reminded that Romania returned to economic growth 10 months after the austerity measures were set in place.

“Romania registered economic growth both in 2011 and 2012. The biggest concern now is the social issue that has been generated by the crisis, namely unemployment, especially youth unemployment. This is where we must find solutions. Merely stating and acknowledging the problem is not enough and if we, at European level, do not take measures to create jobs that should be targeted at young people in particular, we risk losing a whole generation,” the President stressed.

The Romanian head of state said that Europe needs more integration to boost its competitiveness in the global competition together with structural reforms that should underlie the competitiveness growth.

“We need major regional programs, important regional projects. And we unreservedly back two of them: one is the Danube Strategy – and now, when we discuss about the coming in effect of the new Union budget – we should transform beautiful statements about the Danube Strategy into reality. This means that in the projects it will refer to the Commission, in the priority projects eligible for funding during the 2014 – 2020 programming period, each riverside state must assign the necessary resources for the implementation of the Danube Strategy, resources coming from the cohesion funds. A second project that I consider to be of vital importance and for which four heads of state – me included – have jointly signed a letter, is the Nabucco project, which is aimed at diversifying energy solutions and gas supply sources for a larger number of countries, not just the four to be transited by the Nabucco West pipeline,” Basescu said.AGERPRES