I. International Balance of Payments

1. Current Account

The statistics released by the BNR show that in January-December 2019, Romania’s current account deficit was 10.478 billion euros, with an increase of 16.9% year on year (see table 1)

Table 1：Romania’s International Balance of Payments (Current Account) in January-December 2019

Unit: million euros

*preliminary statistics

**data sources: INS--international trade in goods; the FOB import was calculated by BNR using the CIF/FOB conversion ratio of 1.0430 set by the INS

The data in table 1 show that from January to December 2019, the deficit of Romania's trade in goods and services totaled 8.805 billion euros, with an increase of 36.6% year on year. Of the total amount, the deficit of trade in goods was 17.359 billion euros, with a year-on-year increase of 17.3%; the surplus of trade in service was 8.554 billion euros, with a year-on-year increase of 2.3%.

In terms of the industries of trade in services, the surplus of processing trade service was 2.793 billion euros, with an increase of 1.4% year on year; the surplus of transportation industry was 4.345 billion euros, with an increase of 9.2% year on year; the deficit of tourism was 2.142 billion euros, with an increase of 30.2% year on year; the surplus of other service industries was 3.558 billion euros, with a year-on-year increase of 8.8%.

The deficit of primary income was 3.234 billion euros, down 14.1% year on year. The surplus of secondary income was 1.561 billion euros, up 24.7% year on year.

2. Capital Account

From January to December 2019, the FDI in Romania totaled 5.296 billion euros (estimated value), of which the portfolio investment of transnational corporations was 119 million euros, and equity investment was 5.177 billion euros.

II. Foreign debts

According to the data released by the BNR, as of the end of December 2019, Romania's short-term and long-term external outstanding debt totaled 106 billion euros, with an increase of 6.2% compared with that at the end of 2018 (see Table 2).

Table 2: Romania’s Foreign Debts from January to end-December 2019 and the Foreign Debt Repayment in January-December 2019

Unit: million euros

**preliminary statistics *** predicted statistics e estimated statistics

(a) Direct contractual loans of Romania’s Ministry of Public Finance or local governments according to Romania’s Public Foreign Debt Law

(b) Guaranteed loans of Romania’s Ministry of Public Finance or local governments according to Romania’s Public Foreign Debt Law

According to the above table, the balance of short-term foreign debt was 33.260 billion euros, with an increase of 5.4% compared with that at the end of 2018, accounting for 31.4% of the total foreign debt over the same period, decreased by 0.2 percentage points compared with that at the end of 2018. The balance of long-term foreign debt was 72.740 billion euros, with an increase of 6.5% compared with that at the end of 2018, accounting for 68.6% of the total foreign debt over the same period, increased by 0.2 percentage points compared with that at the end of 2018.

In terms of foreign debt structure, the balance of direct public debt and publicly guaranteed debt was 39.490 billion euros, up 13.3% compared with that at the end of 2018, accounting for 54.3% and 37.3% of the long-term foreign debt and total foreign debt over that period respectively. The balance of non-publicly guaranteed foreign debt was 32.034 billion euros, with an decrease of 0.6% compared with that at the end of 2018, accounting for 44.0% and 30.2% of the long-term foreign debt and total foreign debt over that period respectively.

In terms of debt repayment, in January-December 2019, Romania paid off 66.139 billion euros, of which the repayment rate of the long-term foreign debt was 18%, 22.3% lower than the foreign debt repayment rate over the same period in 2018.

The import coverage of goods and services was 4.6 months, lower than that at the end of 2018 (4.8 months).

3. Foreign exchange reserves

By the end of December 2019, the BNR’s holding of foreign exchange reserves was 32.926 billion euros, down 891 million euros compared with that in the previous month.

The gold reserve was 103.6 tons. Due to the fluctuation of the gold price, the market value was 4.524 billion euros. The international reserves (foreign exchange + gold) were 37.450 billion euros, decreased by 778 million euros compared with that in the previous month.

BNR’s foreign public debt and publicly guaranteed foreign debt that fell due in January 2019 amounted to 67 million euros.