Given Romania’s relatively poor performance from a financial literacy perspective, many public and private entities are currently implementing various initiatives to address this problem. Assuming that financial education projects are a source of insights into broader societal issues, we analyze a sample of financial education projects to discern the issues of societal transformation reflected in their contents. We collected data from financial education websites and analyzed them through qualitative content analysis. We identify and discuss several manifest and latent themes and note the absence of others commonly found in the literature. The emphasis in the manifest themes falls on offering calibrated advice to a public with a relatively low level of financial literacy, prone to unhealthy behaviors such as consumerism, impulse buying, and indebtedness. Several latent concerns concentrate on the changing economic and social landscape, the fear that some traits of national character may hinder the individual appetite for adaptation, and the threat of an economic crisis. The needs of vulnerable groups are rarely addressed, while topics such as the ethical dimension of consumption, environmental and sustainability issues, and gender stereotypes are lacking. We thus find that the financial education initiatives in Romania address an underdeveloped range of topics.
The multifaceted interplay of economic and political factors in the process of euro adoption suggests the opportunity to take a political economy perspective on this complex issue. In this sense, a number of key political-economy related issues can be distilled in relation to the process of euro adoption, which will structure the following analysis. What are the key national winners and losers of this possible event? What role has interest groups pressure played in this process? Under what circumstances may bureaucracies such as the central bank body of experts act as a deterrent for the political end that is the single currency adoption? How are internationally exposed companies expected to behave and to promote their interests in relation to this event? What is the relative importance of the internal politics dynamic for euro adoption? We rely on process tracing to approach these questions for the Romanian case. Policy documents, newspaper articles, academic articles, economic indicators, and elite interviews are used to create an analytical narrative based both on a one-point-in-time description of the situation and on a timeline that lists the sequence of some relevant events. We argue that a specific combination of economic and political factors led to the failed euro adoption in Romania.
As a member of the European Union (EU), Romania is required to adopt the European single currency once it fulfils all the convergence criteria. As of June 2017, the national currency has not yet joined the preparatory two-year phase (the Exchange Rate Mechanism -ERM) necessary for the adoption of the euro and a certain target date has not been established. Over the years, different target dates have been officially set and communicated to the public, only to be later deemed unrealistic and postponed.The aim of this study is to present the state of the debate regarding the adoption of the euro and to describe how the main arguments have developed in recent years. To this end, academic studies both by Romanian and foreign specialists that treat the issue of euro adoption by Romania are reviewed and analyzed. Also, a number of recent typical popular press articles on this subject are presented and investigated. In addition, public positions recently taken by important political players and appointed officials such as the ones in the Central Bank are discussed and the core arguments found in these discourses are highlighted.Insights from the political discourse analysis body of literature are used to decipher the policy-related meaning of the text and context that accompany public declarations of some key political actors. The main storylines that can be found in this literature are identified and analyzed in terms of economic and political reasoning as well as rhetoric.
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