Romania will sign deficit target agreement with the next European Commission

Romania will sign an agreement with the next European Commission so that in seven years it will reach the 3% governmentdeficit required under the Maastricht Treaty, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said on Tuesday.He was asked by journalists if taxes will increase next year and what will happen to the government deficit."First of all, we had an agreement with the European Commission for three years, from a historical deficit of 9.2%, the highest in Europe, unimaginable for any government, and we promised that within three years we will reach 3%, in a year when access to European funds was huge, in which you closed a past financial year, 2016 - 2020, where you had the obligation to come up with 15% of funding you had the current financial year, which had started after a year to have mature projects and you had the investments from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR)... How can you promise, in Romania's most important moment of development, a deficit of 3%? Truly, what the commission told us and we have respected and will respect it this year too - under no circumstances should we have a consumption-triggered deficit. (...) We have reached a dialogue with the commission and, of course, with the next commission we will sign the agreement to have a seven-year entry into the deficit under the Maastricht Treaty of 3%, with a 0.74% annual decrease. That shows that no one wants to increase any tax or rate," Ciolacu said. According to him, the measures to be taken to curtail tax avoidance will continue, based on digital transformation and risk modules developed through artificial intelligence."We need an orderly Romania; when I said that, everyone laughed. It is necessary to see what priorities are in investments, so that public money is redirected where it multiplies rapidly in the economy. (...) Everything is done after risk analyses."Ciolacu on Tuesday participated in the release the 22nd edition of the work "White Paper of SMEs in Romania".