The US Administration will earmark as much as $2.5bn in the next few years, for projects developed by US firms in Southeast Europe and especially Romania, Romanian Public Finance minister Mihai Tanasescu said. According to the minister, the US companies are mainly interested in oil and gas, electricity, telecommunications (chiefly mobile telephony), transports and hotels.
Financing will come in form of guarantees for exporters, granted by Eximbank USA, as well as loans and investments made by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), an agency subordinated to the US government.
According to the Finance minister, the US initiative comes as a result of improved economic and political stability in Romania and of the country's NATO accession, deriving at the same time from the American policy for Southeast Europe. The US project was discussed on Wednesday in Bucharest by Romanian minister Tanasescu and OPIC chairman Peter Watson, during the "Creating New Partnerships in Emerging Europe" conference, organised by OPIC.
Also, OPIC announced it would set up a $145m investment fund, aimed at the Central and Eastern Europe projects. This way, the organisation plans to identify business opportunities in the region and to inject capital into new companies and into growth.
Established in 1971, OPIC has been part of more than 3,200 investment projects in developing countries, worth some $150 billion. Among these, 126 projects worth almost 2.7 billion dollars involved European transition countries.
Central and East European countries are quite integrated, commercially speaking, into the European Union, but they need to be more open to trade in the region, said the World Bank's chief economist for Europe and Central Asia, Pradeep Mitra.
The statement was made during the same conference organised by OPIC. Mitra feels that the transition process has made progress in the area, as no slip-ups have been signalled so far. At the same time, the countries in this region have succeeded in attaining macroeconomic stability. High inflation rates are only reported in the case of Romania, where the average yearly inflation is above 14%, as well as in Serbia and Montenegro, where inflation ranges between 12% and 13%.
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