How serious pension budget deficit is

The social security budget ended the first nine months with a 742 million RON deficit, over 75% lower than in the same time of 2009, as official data reveal, leaving the impression that payment of pensions is not such a big financing problem.

The pension budget execution has seen fluctuations from one month to another partly because of the transfers of funds from the state budget, which do not show as such as in the data published by the Finance Ministry. Whereas in May the budget execution revealed an almost 90 million RON surplus, in August it had an over 1.2 billion RON deficit. The explanation for this surplus is not some spectacular performance in the collection of social security contributions, but a transfer from the state budget worth 4.23 billion RON. The statistical picture is thus blurred by these flows of money between budgets, which try to cover the issue of chronic social security deficits.