Romania PM Asks Ministers To Present Concrete Restructuring Plans In Public Sector

Ministers are expected to work on strategies and look for solutions needed to sack certain categories of public sector employees.

The sources also said that some ministers have already called for audits meant to indicate the exact number of employees needed to ensure efficiency and performance within the public institutions under their supervision.

Boc has recently asked his Cabinet to prepare the second stage of the public sector restructuring process, to follow last summer's reorganization of government agencies, a move which will entail layoffs to lower public spending.

Romanian Finance Minister Sebastian Vladescu said in January that public institutions would have to apply a program meant to sack nearly 100,000 public sector employees. He later retracted, after Prime Minister Boc said the layoffs would be made according to cost standards.

At the time, Jeffrey Franks, head of the International Monetary Fund mission to Bucharest, told television station ProTV in an interview that the number of jobless people might reach one million, a figure which was also refuted by Romanian authorities.

The Government pledged to reduce staff expenses by 0.2% of GDP in 2010, through layoffs in the public sector, in negotiations with the IMF for the disbursement of the 3rd and 4th tranches of the loan.

In August 2009, the Government decided to reorganize and merge government agencies, so that the country's 223 agencies were reduced to half and 7,800 jobs were scrapped.

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