After four years in office, the Government has shifted its focus from transport and infrastructure to education, pensions and social security, with regard to the budget.
The 2008 budget focuses on education, social security and agriculture, while the 2005 budget delivered more money for infrastructure, transport and defence. This conclusion can be drawn from an analysis of the Government's spending priorities in the budgets from 2005-2008.
Next year, education will receive almost four times more money than in 2005 - 16.6bn RON against 4.4bn RON in 2005. Due to the significant increase education spending, this field has moved from being the fifth most important for the Government (in 2005) to the top spot in 2007 and 2008, getting the highest budgetary allocation.
The same goes for the Labour Ministry, which has three times higher spending allocated for 2008 than in 2005 (14bn RON compared with 4.7bn RON in 2005). The Labour Ministry has thus moved from fourth (in 2005) to the second place among budget priorities, a position it has kept since 2006. Agriculture is also among the "stars" of the budget for 2008, ranking third in terms of public funds spending, after having been left out of the top five in 2005 and 2006.
At the same time, the Transports Ministry is the biggest loser of the budgetary allocations for next year. After having been the top priority of the government spending in 2005 and 2006, Transports were relegated to the fifth place in 2007 and to fourth in 2008.
Throughout the four years in office of the current government, the spending allocated to Transports, that is to infrastructure and housing rose by only 60%.
Another field that has gone down on the list of priorities for the Government is Defence, which was second in 2005 and slipped to fifth in the budget set for next year. Public defence spending rose by 45% in the four years.
Transports and defence have gone down in the ranking of ministries by amount of expenses, because the amounts of money allocated to these fields rose much more slowly than the overall public spending pace.
In other words, the Government has shifted focus from infrastructure to education and social protection, as the years went by. For 2008, which is a parliamentary elections year, the Government has prepared one of the highest increases in spending for social protection of all the budget chapters.
Therefore the public spending for social security and assistance will amount to 50.1 billion euros in 2008, 31% higher than that scheduled for this year. As a comparison, the total expenses of the general consolidated budget will increase by only 20%. The main target of the social protection funds is raising pensions by 43% from January 1, 2008, a step taken this summer.
Yet to get pension money, the Government will have to reassess some of its costs, and personnel spending was the first targeted. Personnel spending will go up by only 5% next year, according to the budget draft, while the average growth pace of the last few years has stood at more than 31%.
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