The Minister of European Investment and Projects, Cristian Ghinea, states that „PNRR is not Santa’s investment list; it is also a list of assumed reforms followed by money„.
The Ministry of European Investments and Projects announced on Thursday that the financial allocations for PNRR were finalized on Wednesday evening in inter-ministerial negotiations and will be made public next week when there will be a first reading of the government decision.
Minister Ghinea announced that after May 1, the negotiation procedure for PNRR components with the European Commission will be officially opened and warned that for the European executive „areas that provide for investment reforms will prevail”.
„We have included important reforms in the PNRR. For the first time since we joined the EU, the reforms required by the Commission within the country’s annual recommendations also have some amounts attached: pension system reform, civil service reform, management reform in state-owned companies, social assistance reform,” stated Cristian Ghinea.
The Minister detailed elements of civil service reform: “We refer to organising a national competition for civil servants, an admission exam for accessing to the category of civil servants, as it is for example in the EC, the EPSO system, instead of having competitions for each position, which we know very well that it is a faulty system. We want to have an admission to this system based on merit, on a regional examination, and management of private human resources companies. One can access this body of civil servants on a meritocratic basis and then they are distributed to public positions through a new competition procedure. If we managed to do that, that would be a real revolution, a reform; it is a reform integrated into this first draft and budgeted”.
The management part of state-owned companies is a reform that we will include, Minister Ghinea also announced, and mentioned: „Besides these major reforms, there are various changes in each area of investment.”
Cristian Ghinea made these statements during the conference „The strategy of the Romanian economy in the decade that will change the world: The Resilience Plan„, organized on Thursday by CursDeGuvernare.ro.