A román adózási rendszer

Abstract

The history of Romania’s taxation system after the collapse of communism in 1989 is closely in­tertwined with the country’s transition from a centralized, planned economy to a market-oriented system and, ultimately, with its efforts to join the European Union (EU). Between 1989 and 2007, Romania expe­rienced repeated waves of fiscal reform, marked by legislative experimentation, institutional restructuring, and adaptation to external pressures from international organizations and the EU acquis communautaire. This period can be understood as a process of convergence: from improvisation and fiscal survival in the early 1990s, through codification and stabilization in the 2000s, to harmonization with European norms in the years immediately preceding accession. In 2007, Romania acceded to the EU, entering the Union with high expectations but with limited preparedness for the challenges that lay ahead. The immediate post-accession period triggered profound political, economic, and fiscal transformations, many of them driven by the dual pressures of European integration and domestic reform. Among the most pressing fiscal concerns were the need to enhance the efficiency of tax policy, modernize the collection system, and add­ress the chronic problem of tax arrears, which had long undermined budgetary stability. Our study seeks to trace the evolution of the Romanian tax system since the fall of the communist regime. In the first, we present the development of the legal framework regulating taxation by using mainly the legal databases of the country. In the second part, we undertake an economic analysis of the sector that relies primarily on official data from the Ministry of Finance, the National Institute of Statistics (INSSE), and Eurostat, which together provide a robust empirical foundation for assessing both the challenges and the achievements of this ongoing transformation.