Romanian agri-food economy and investments over the last 20 years – special examination on the last 5 years of EU membership

Abstract

Starting from Romania’s economy position on the global competitiveness scale (on which Romania dropped by ten places in the last year), the agri-food sector being an important economic driving factor of the economy, the paper attempts to identify certain sets of macroeconomic variables determining non-performant generation of value added (level and annual dynamics), which induced radical structural changes in the share of the main branches (agriculture, industry and construction) in the essential resources of the economy (employment, fixed capital stock and net investment) and in its results (gross value added). The first set of variables is of correlative type, at macro-economic level (energy intensity of the economy; “real wages – productivity” correlation; intra-component ratios of the consumer price index). The second type of variables is of sectoral type, at the agri-food economy level (disintegrative “double fracture”; upstream and downstream economic driving effects). The third set of performance reductive variables is of structural type, in the so-called “agri-food” chain (tri-dimensional structure of the agri-food chain – economic operators, employed persons and generated gross value added; average agri-food commercial openness). In the end, we also want to highlight the importance of the relations between businessman and institutions, as regulator and interface, the institutions and organizations which have attributes in investment field and contribute to the creation of the value added in economy. We must have in view that, based on the analysis of the contribution of the institutions to the forming of the business environment, taking into account the recommendations of the investors and their perception of the market, we can easily realize a profile of the economy. Always, the attitude of the investors can give us the measure of the maturity of the economy.