Why are foreign investors dodging Romania? What should we do to lure them? Should we give incentives or not? Which country has originated the most investments? And the most powerful investors?
Whether the Romanian state can answer this question, is one side of the issue, but before these questions can be asked, something else is needed: a gauge for foreign investment.
In other words, the Romanian state should be able to know that in the year 2000, x million dollars landed in Romania, of which y from Italy or z from Turkey.
But, according to two recent statistical reports, the Bulletin of the National Bank of Romania and that of the National Statistics Commission, this gauge is not unique.
For instance, in the first five months, the amounts reported in the Net Direct Investments section, Foreign Payments Balance chapter, of the NBR Bulletin, are five or six times greater than those reported in the CNS Bulletin, in the Foreign Investors chapter.
The CNS draws its information from the National Trade Register Office, which monitors, according to the law, all share capital subscriptions in lei or hard currency.
Based on these records, the Office produces a ranking of countries depending on the amount of investments and the number of companies established with capital from each particular country.
Since the Office faxes out monthly reports to all media, the data is being treated as foreign investments. We then hear analyst upon analyst lamenting over these foreign investments, calling them sparse, scanty, or sublime but entirely absent.
In reality, those references are to foreign investments, but not to all foreign investments, although they are assumed to be as such.
On the other hand, the NBR bulletin, which, according to central bank explanations and not to explanations which should perhaps accompany the document, also includes capital increases, money borrowed abroad by foreign companies to invest in Romania, as well as what the State Ownership Fund sells to foreign companies.
Where to look? In the CNS Bulletin, which details countries and company numbers, or in NBR's, where the amounts are much bigger, therefore more credible, but there are no indications as to countries or to the components of the total amount?
Perhaps the people who should know do know the real situation. But this data should be out in the open for everyone to know, or else we will end up not knowing what world we are living in.
The schizophrenia of the communist system was not only in the "enthusiastic" allegiances to the party's guidelines at work and hearty swearing at home, but in the phoney statistics it worked with.
Hence a great frustration for economic analysts: most of the statistical data used are dated 1990 or later. As if Romania had not existed before.
Without any data, with rigged data or with poorly recorded data, any analysis and any decision based on that analysis is pointless. Before finding out why foreign investments are so paltry in Romania, authorities should first know whether they are paltry at all.
You cannot know where you are going until you know where you started off.
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