Foreigners control 33% of the economy, with only 17% of total employees

Foreigners brought capital in Romania, which enables them to control one third of the economy, but the foreign capital companies employ only about 760,000 people, that is 17% of the total employees in the economy, data received by Ziarul Financiar from the Trade Registry reveal.

Foreign companies account for about one third of the total 250 billion euro turnover of the companies in Romania.

This is the first time when the statistics have been made public, though a question remains now, about the real impact of the foreign investments on the Romanian economy in terms of work force employment and business.

Ziarul Financiar calculated these percentages based on the data from the Statistics Institute, from the Trade Registry and from the listafirme.ro portal, which has a software application that can sort companies in Romania by various parameters, such as turnover, number of employees or net profit.

"It is the nature of the business that makes a company more productive with a lower number of employees. For instance, the companies working in telecommunications have a turnover per employee that is several times higher than an SME's, where most of the Romanian capital is concentrated," says Florin Pogonaru, chairman of the Association of Businesspeople in Romania.

Indeed, the companies in Romania in terms of turnover include major companies like Orange and Vodafone, whose business stands at over 1 billion euros, derived with a mere several thousand employees, therefore the productivity stands at 4-500,000 euros per employee.

All the companies in Romania, operating in industry, construction, trade and services posted 958 billion RON (250 billion euros) in turnover in 2008, according to recent data of the Statistics Institute, which means an average productivity of less than 60,000 euros per employee, considering there are 4.4 million employees in all. At the same time, foreign capital companies generated about 80 billion euros in turnover in 2008, about 33% of the total, according to listafirme.ro, which uses Finance Ministry data.