In a speech on Tuesday to a plenary session of Parliament, President Traian Basescu said that the public administration needs to get professional so that staff recruitment may be conducted along competence lines and not political ones, also stressing that what he called the waste of healthcare resources should be halted.

‘Public wages were cut by 25 percent. I know that this has generated dissatisfactions and frustration. Wages in the public sector are very small for those early in their careers. Likewise, there are public employees with experience and seniority who deserve better pay, but we all should realise that we have an oversized administrative apparatus. We have public counters that only waste time and get on the citizens’ nerves,’ said Basescu.

He added that turning the public administration professional is an essential objective of Romania’s in the next years so that there will not be many public employees on small wages but a corps of well-paid elite professionals. The President added that a structural analysis is needed accompanied by staff recruitment along performance lines and not political ones. ‘This is an ongoing process that the Government has to accelerate.

Excessive politicisation is the enemy of high performance in the Administration. Periodical replacements on political grounds at all levels have led to poorly performing, weak institutions today that are not able to generate long-term vision and projects, that are unable to absorb European funds,’ said Basescu.
The President argued the education system and the healthcare system are not properly funded yet, but it is important that the existing resources should be correctly used.

‘A great share of the resources are within the systems and all it takes is a fair allocation of the resources. It is inadmissible that over the past ten years healthcare appropriations have increased almost four times but services quality has not improved. This is clear proof that system under-funding is not the first problem, but the waste of resources and inefficient management are,’ said Basescu.

He said the Government should continue to reform these systems, decentralise and rank schools and healthcare units so that the existing money will encourage high performance.
The President pointed out that inequities in the public sector should be eliminated under a law that will set the right pay ratios between various categories of employees.
Basescu said social programmes and pensions make up 46 percent of the Government’s revenues and the weight of public wages in the Budget is 30 percent of the Government receipts.

He pointed out that this spring Romania agreed in a memorandum with the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the World Bank to carry out measures that will further curtail public spending.
‘This agreement means a comeback to reality. But there is only one reality: we can no longer spend more than what the Romanian economy can generate and we also can no longer borrow money for consumption only,’ said Basescu.