Romania is no longer competitive in terms of adequate workforce availability, says FIC

The most recent results of the Foreign Investors Council Business Sentiment Index (carried out in September 2018) brings some important insights on both workforce and fiscal related topics.

2018-09-26 14:21:33

For the first time since FIC has been compiling this sentiment index (2015), a majority of respondents said that Romania is no longer competitive in terms of the availability of adequate workforce.
Two years ago, only a quarter of respondents faced problems on the labour market. Every six months, when publishing the results of the Business Sentiment Index, FIC has warned that this indicator is deteriorating at an alarming rate.

In March 2017, one third of respondents found the Romanian fiscal burden uncompetitive. This was followed by a steep deterioration in September 2017 and March 2018 when two-thirds of respondents expressed a negative opinion about the fiscal system.
"In our view, this was due to erratic announcements of fiscal policy changes without a proper impact assessment and consultation. In this latest survey we noticed a significant improvement, with only one third of respondents complaining about fiscal issues. Currently we observe a certain stability of the fiscal regime: measures announced last year were either implemented or abandoned and this year no major overhauls have been announced. Businesses managed to accommodate these changes despite the considerable effort this entailed," says FIC.

FIC believes that Romania should not jeopardize its competitive advantage and be perceived as lacking fiscal competitiveness because of inconsistent policy and regulatory changes.