Well according to Labor Minister Paul Pacuraru, quoted in the newspaper Ziarul Financiar, Romania needs at least another 300,000 workers to meet current needs and will need more than 1 million within a decade.
The labor shortage, Pacuraru said, is caused partly by a migrating workforce and partly by a declining population, and is most acute in construction, and the textile, automobile and food processing industries.
Maybe he has been reading this blog (and here, and here).
Actually, according to the UK Daily Telegraph finance minister, Varujan Vosganian, aims even higher, saying Romania lacks half a million workers."We need more engineers, mechanics and bricklayers," he is quoted as saying "We have a labour deficit of 500,000 employees."
And he wasn't talking about the elites - doctors and IT programmers gone to make their fortune elsewhere, though that would be damaging enough. Romania needs its skilled labourers to return - the people who are going to build up the infrastructure that the country so severely lacks. But when we look at the wage differentials, this idea of a mass return would seem to be a forelorn hope to me, in Latvia, in Poland, in Ukraine or in Romania.
So the simple issue is, what is now the normal capacity neutral growth rate for Romania at this point (remember this will get less as the population continues to decline)? That is, what is the annual growth rate which Romania is capable of without seeting off the sort of inflation we are seeing at the moment? Noone really knows, but it is obviously well below the rate Romania is currently growing at.
Second question: when and how will the adjustment come?
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