What the newspapers read: December 23, 2009

Most newspapers on Wednesday focus on the 2010 budget and the economic difficulties Romanians should expect from the year to come. 100,000 budgetary personnel will be laid off and the government prefers not to comment. Elsewhere in the news, Sibiu authorities are planning to use a train as public transportation on short distances linking small villages to Sibiu.

For the year to come, local administrations will receive less money, some 100,000 budgetary personnel will be laid off and retired people and students might be left without free transports, Cotidianul reads. However, the government’s policies will not hit all people in the same manner.

The measures put forward by the members of the new Boc government for 2010 announce a tough year. According to the designated Labour minister, Mihai Seitan, there will be 150,000 – 200,000 laid off personnel. Considering that there are 1.7 million people working in the public sector, 11% will lose their job.

Gandul reads that about 100,000 budgetary personnel will be laid off and the government prefers not to comment on the topic. Designated ministers for Labor and Finance give assurances that the government will not have any trouble paying pensions and social allocations in 2010. However, budgetary personnel will have an unpleasant ride.

Salaries will be froze next year, thousands of people laid off. The bad news were announced by designated Finance minister, Sebastian Vladescu. He added that restrictions on salaries will continue for at least three years.

The 2010 draft budget presumes that the government will lay off some 10,000 people. However, Vladescu said that the budgetary personnel will be reduced naturally – by not filling up the vacant places.

Elsewhere in the news, Cotidianul reads about a project initiated by Jens Kielhorn, a German citizen living in Sibiu, central Romania. Together with some of his colleagues, he identified six routes that might take travelers on short distances around Sibiu.

The villages nearby Sibiu are not that easily accessible and the project comes to fill up the gap. The project has a section dedicated to the economic effort such a investment needs. The investment would total about 7.6 million euro and the purchase of the trains, another 8 million euro.