Page 254 - Proceeding 2015

FAMP ANDRONICEANU Armenia and OHANYAN Gurgen
CCASP IMF POLICIES AND THEIR EFFECTS ON EDUCATION IN ROMANIA

enrollment in early education increasing it by 3,2 percent compared with pre-crisis year. Yet, Romania felt

decrease in enrollment of pre-primary education by 3,4 percent in the same period. Hence, 14,5 and 12,9
percents of inhabitants corresponding age group remained out of education in 2012 respectively in
Romania and Bulgaria.

CONCLUSIONS

Romania since fall of socialism regime has made several reforms to improve education sector and to be

more integrated with the EU member-states. Yet, in 2008 by signing a national pact on education all major
parties and civil societies agreed that it is still more need to be done to improve the efficiency of education
sector. On the other side, financial crisis put another pressure on Romanian authorities to implement

those reforms with stringent budget. Moreover, Romania could not solely withstand the adverse effects
of crisis and turned to IMF for assistance, which aggravated the pressure on government to cut the budget

deficit. The latter caused elimination of thousand jobs in public sector, wage freezes and elimination of
13th salary.

Nevertheless, the IMF during the crisis underlined the importance of both education and health sector, in

Romania education sector has felt the serious financial shortages. In this end, we involved Bulgaria as PROCEEDINGS OF THE 11 TH ADMINISTRATION AND PUBLIC MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ”Strategic Management for Local Communities” 30 th – 31 st October 2015 Bucharest
“control group” and make a comparison between those two countries, based on our earlier findings that
those two had closest propensity in pre-crisis years to apply to an IMF program. Thus, two types of
education indicators are employed, i.e. input and output indicators. First one unveils direct impact of

budget cuts on education sector, while the second one attempts to reveal the efficiency of those
expenditures.

Overview of both input and output indicators reveal that Romanian education sector is more affected than

Bulgarian one. Particularly, expenditures on education in Romania are cut more drastically than in
Bulgaria and enrollment of students are more severe than in Bulgaria. Moreover, enrollment in early

education has increased in the observed period in Bulgaria, but dropped down in Romania. On the other
side in both countries predominates the concept, that public educational institutions are better, which is
explained by overwhelming weight of student enrollment in public institutions.

Taking into consideration the rigor of employed methodology in estimation the effects of IMF programs
on Romanian education, we could conclude that during the crisis initiated two SBAs had adverse effects
on Romanian education. It should be noted that the nature of the methodology does not let us to

generalize the results. Yet, in Romanian case IMF programs had negative short and middle-term impact

252