The North American company Air Canada  will operate direct flights at Henri Coanda Airport in Bucharest starting 2018, connecting Romania to the main Canadian airports: Montreal and Toronto.

The Sovereign Development and Investment Fund will be managed by the Ministry of Finance, and ministries who have managed the fund companies so far, will retain certain coordination prerogatives, Energy Minister Toma Petcu said in a conference quoted by Agerpress. 

"Through the governing programme, one of the strategic objectives is the sovereign investment fund, important for Romania's economic development, which will be an economic development engine. In my opinion, all companies, not just in the field of energy, because we are talking about a general investment fund, all profitable companies that have strong capitalization in any field should be in this fund, depending on the communication we will have with the European Commission and based on the decisions regarding competition, so as not to cause problems," the minister said.

Bucharest City's two airports - Henri Coanda and Aurel Vlaicu - have joined the top five Q1 2017 highest rising airports in terms of passenger traffic increases, according to news from the Airports Council International Europe cited by the Bucharest National Airport Corporation (CNAB) in a press statement.

In the group of airports welcoming between 5 and 10 million passengers per year Henri Coanda (OTP) was third, with a 21.5-percent increase, after Reykjavik-Keflavik (Iceland) and Kiev. Bucharest Baneasa (BBU) was first in terms of growth in the group of airports welcoming less than 5 million passengers per year. It was followed by Foggia (Italy), Nis (Serbia), Zadar (Croatia) and Oradea, according to ACI Europe.

Three percent of the total Romanian companies represent the engine of the domestic economy and half of them are in difficulty, according to the third edition of the CITR Group study on the evolution of the impact companies between 2013 and 2015.

The number of these impact companies is shrinking, from 23,384 in 2013 to 19,564 in 2015. If this shrinking trend persists, the whole economy may be affected by contagion shows the CITR study. All this in the context in which Romania is not able to generate enough new entrepreneurs to compensate for the imbalance in Romanian business.

Romania, alongside three other EU Member States, had a government deficit (calculated based on ESA methodology, the European Accounts system - e.n.) of 3 pct or more of the GDP, according to a preliminary estimate released on Monday by Eurostat. In contrast, at the end of 2016, Romania was among the EU Member States with the lowest level of government debt against the Gross Domestic Product (37.6 pct). Eurostat points out that it has not made any changes to the data reported by the Member States. The Eurostat data differ from the figures presented in the execution of the consolidated general budget for 2016, according to which last year ended with a 18.3 billion lei deficit, 2.41 pct of the GDP respectively, on the increase by almost one percentage point as compared to the negative balance of 1.47 pct of the GDP in 2015.