East Europe: "Inevitable" budget cuts anger unions

Source Inter Press Service

Trade unions in Romania and Bulgaria are embarking on a spring of protests in response to the governments' anti-crisis measures involving considerable cuts in budget expenditure. In 2009, Romania's GDP decreased by seven percent. Faced with a budget deficit of 7.2 percent for 2009, Romanian Prime Minister Emil Boc declared this month that the governmental economic austerity plan must be strictly adhered to "unless we want to end up like Greece". Similar warnings are coming from Sofia. Bulgaria was running a budget surplus when the effects of the global economic crisis reached the country. This allowed Sofia to finish 2009 with a budget deficit of less than one percent of GDP and avoid, for now, a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - a loan undertaken by neighbouring Romania in 2009. However, the country's GDP decreased by five percent in 2009. And, in the first two months of 2010, Bulgaria already accumulated a deficit of 1.8 percent of GDP, making economists issue tough warnings. "The government is demonstrating an inability to control the budget deficit," says Georgi Ganev, head of economic research at the Sofia think tank, Centre for Liberal Studies. "If the foreign markets sniff an inability to hold the budget, the Greek scenario will unleash with full force, much easier and much quicker than in Greece itself."