Romania’s Most Public Employees Work in Police, Education

Romania registers the most public employees in education and police. More precisely, over one million two hundred public employees are working at the Ministry of Education and MAI (Ministry of Internal Affairs).

According to the Ministry of Finance, the number of positions filled in public institutions and authorities in Romania in June 2022 was 1,269,712, 5 more than in the previous month. Nearly 64% of those positions were in the central public administration. 597,099 of the 812,395 workers in the central public administration were employed by organizations that received all their funding from the state budget.

The Ministry of Education had 292,021, the Ministry of Internal Affairs had 123,753, the Ministry of National Defense had 73,652, the Ministry of Finance had 24,338 positions open, and the Ministry of Health had 18,262 vacancies.

According to Agerpres, 9,297 posts were filled in institutions with social insurance budget funding, 43,751 positions were filled in institutions with state and unemployment insurance budget subsidies, and 162,248 jobs were filled in institutions with own income funding exclusively. The local public administration employed 457,317 people in June 2022, including 178,180 in institutions that were entirely or partially funded by their revenues and 279,137 in institutions that were fully or partially subsidized by local budgets.

At first sight, Romania has an impressive number of public employees, an optimistic situation for the labour sector, bearing in mind that Romania is one of the European countries facing a reasonably significant unemployment rate. However, the increase in public employees raises many question marks. First, how many of these employees got the job on merit, it is known that nepotism and corruption are at high levels in Romania. Second, what percentage of these employees perform an efficient job and actively contribute to the development of the institutions they work for, knowing that in Romania, especially in the public sectors, there is more wasting time than working. There are many journalistic studies on the topic of budgetary employees in the Romanian state, and many summarize the abnormal. So, where is Romania heading? Is it a favourable situation for the country or an alarm signal?