The 2023 budget comes with a number of pay raises for public sector employees. Minister of Finance Dumitru Budianschi said the public sector employees will enjoy a fixed rise of 1,300 lei in salaries as from January 2023. This rise advantages primarily the salary earners with very low pays. As there are insufficient funds, the pensions in April 2023 will be indexed by 14.1% only, IPN reports.

The minister said that to help the citizens cope with inflation, the salaries of public sector employees will be raised by 1,300 lei. A sum of 3.7 billion lei will be allocated in 2023 for the purpose.

“By the salary policy for next year, it was decided to increase all the salaries by a fixed amount of 1,300 lei. The measure was accepted in the current form for protecting the employees with small salaries. If we had raised the salaries based on the reference value, the rise for persons who have pays of 4,000 lei would have been paltry. The raise for those whose salaries are higher would have been proportionally higher. It was therefore decided to raise the pays by a fixed amount. This means the persons who have 5,000 lei will have 6,300 lei, which is a growth of 20%, while the rise for those who have 10,000 lei or more will be of 10-13%,” Dumitru Budianschi stated in the program “Résumé with Ileana Pîrgaru” on RliveTV channel.

Under the current legislation, the indexation of pensions for 2023 should take place according to the rate of inflation at the end of 2022, which is of at least 30%. But the minister of finance said the funds are enough to raise the pensions by only 14.1%.

“We will index the pensions by 14.1%. Later, in the course of the year, depending on the collected revenues, we will return to this subject. But we must take into account the fact that the indexation of 2022 and the provided lump sums helped to maintain the value of pensions, not excellently, but close to the losses caused by inflation. It goes primarily to small pensions as the pensioners with higher pensions had also greater losses due to inflation. We estimate that the revenues of the social insurance budget will increase by 14% and we cannot index the pensions by a higher amount,” explained Dumitru Budianschi.

He also said that the deficit of the 2023 state budget represents 6% of the GDP, which is over 18 billion lei. The authorities bank on 15 billion lei in foreign funds for covering the largest part of the budget deficit.