A new IMF Mission comes to Bucharest in June for the third assessment of the stand-by agreement

A Mission of the International Monetary Fund will arrive next Monday, June 2, in Bucharest for the third review of  the 2-year Stand-By Arrangement (SBA). It is an intermediary review requested by the Romanian authorities and it coincides with the planned Article IV consultation and the mid-year budget rectification. During this visit, there will be analyzed the performance in the first half of 2014, the prospects of economic growth and revenue to the state budget being other topics targeted.

Hence, the hot spot on the agenda is the decrease of the CAS (social insurance contribution) by 5 percentage points in the second half of the year, as Ioana-Maria Petrescu, the Minister of Finance announced yesterday, during a press conference. This fiscal measure should come into force as from July 1 and it is expected to act as an incentive to the business environment with positive effects on limiting undeclared work.

In late March 2014, the IMF’s Board completed the first and second reviews of Romania’s economic evolution under the conditions agreed in the SBA, subsequent to the IMF Mission that came to Bucharest at the end of January 2014. With those assessment completed, the Fund made available for disbursement an additional amount of 436 million euro, thus the total resources Romania can access under the SBA come to some 654 million euro of nearly 2 billion euro - the total amount.