Electricity consumption, an indicator whose trend shows how the economy is doing, went down by about 1.3% in the first quarter, after having gone up by more than 4.4% in the same time last year, according to the Romanian Energy Regulatory Authority (ANRE) data.
The information comes amid a number of events that reveal a continuation of local industry’s problems.
The decline in orders as a result of a lack of a new model to be manufactured in Mioveni (southern Romania) made the management of Automobile Dacia, the country’s largest exporter halt production for two days on March 30 and April 2. The 13,500 employees of the company were paid 85% of the wages.
In the absence of a clunkers program that will only begin this month, sales of vehicles on the local market fell by 11% to 9,631 units in the first two months. The decline in car sales was 7.1% to 8,015 units.
The management of Mechel Campia Turzii announced at the end of last week that it would lay off almost 800 of the 1,904 employees of the plant as of June.
Romania’s budget was hurt in terms of taxes by the bad weather in February, which froze half of the economy in place because of the snow and cold, shifting from a surplus of 0.2% of the gross domestic product in January to a deficit of 0.44% of GDP in February. Total revenue in February went up by merely 1.2%.
Industrial output and exports remained in positive territory in the first month of the year but the growth visibly slowed down, affected by the decline in demand from the euro zone, the main market for Romanian products.
Moreover, the signals coming from foreign markets are hardly encouraging.
Economic analysts say that it would not be surprising if Romania’s economy shrank in the first quarter because of the slowdown of the European economy and of the bad weather at the beginning of the year, but see economic activity picking up in the second quarter.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)