According to the same data, between January and July 2010, revenues went up by 1.2%, especially due to the collection of VAT and excises, while general expenditure increased by 3.2%. Personnel expenses went down by 4.7% and, goods and services expenditure also diminished by 2.2% as compared to the same period last year. The most significant drop was registered in the state budget, 24.8%, while local budget expenditure grew by 7.8%.
In another move, the National Statistics Institute has recently announced that in the second quarter of the year, Romania’s GDP registered a slight increase of 0.3%, as compared to the first quarter, but it’s still dropping if we compare it with the corresponding period of last year, therefore the economy as a whole actually contracted by 1.5% in the first six months of 2010.

PM Emil Boc has commented the recent statistics, according to which Romania is about to overcome recession. He has stated that although this growth is timid, it is the first after several quarters of recession. Boc believes that the situation would have been better if flooding had not hit and the Constitutional Court had not overturned the Government’s decision to cut pensions by 15%. As a result, the executive decided to increase the VAT from 19 to 24%. Emil Boc: