This presentation is part of: E30-1 Financial Crises and Business Cycles

Specific Causes and Effects of the International Crisis in Romania

Andrei Hrebenciuc, Ph.D, Cristian Socol, Ph.D, and Aura Socol, Ph.D. Economics, Academy of Economic Studies, Romana square nr.6, Bucharest, 010371, Romania

Abstract
Romania is one of the most vulnerable countries to the effects of the international financial and economic crisis. This paper states the fact that this crisis has touched Romania as a consequence of three effects: contagion, cumulative causality and herd effect. The crisis prevention mechanisms are fully absent in Romania. The foreign crisis overlapped the major lack of balances in our economy, creating an even deeper crisis in Romania. In this work, we reveal the channels through which the international financial crisis entered Romania and increased its gravity: the lack of automatic stabilization mechanisms and the high twin deficits – the budget deficit and the current account deficit.  Romania's advantage is represented by a stable banking system, as a result of the a strong prudential supervising mechanism elaborated by the National Bank of Romania and of the lack of toxic assets, as a result of the poor variety of the bank services. In the last section of this paper, we give arguments for the hypothesis that the Anti-crisis Plan proposed by the Romanian authorities lacks vision and we propose anti-crisis solutions accompanied by terms, financing sources and impact. The statistical data are provided by the Romanian official institutions (The National Institute for Statistic and Economic Studies, The National Forecast Commission, The National Bank of Romania) and also by international financial institutions (The European Union, IMF, The World Bank).  The expected results are a good apprehension of the crisis causes in Romania, a modification of the authorities' vision regarding the measures for counteracting the effects of the crisis – from treating effects to treating causes – and for elaborating a coherent anti-crisis effect, based on imagining a post-crisis scenario in the Romanian economy, which is absent for the moment.
JEL classification: F42, H 62, O11