Fiscal reforms - Romania's Integrating Actions to EMU

摘要

As a direct absolute drawing rule to the public authority's disposal, taxes are also the main regulators and engines of the social and economic system. However, their functions' exacerbation by growing the fiscal burden could lead to very negative social and economic consequences, since an old saying predicted that "it might kill the goose with the golden eggs". The estimation of the fiscal burden derives from a classic index that expresses the part of GDP that state takes as taxes and that might be relatively bigger in the developed countries than in the developing ones, directly connected with the whole volume of the national revenue. Associated with the fiscal policy, the term of fiscal pressure is widely spread in the literature and indicates the magnitude of the national revenue redistribution through taxes. Generally, it is a specialized word that expresses the average of the fiscal burden's intensity as a tax-payers' obligation to the central and local public authority. The amplitude and dynamics of the fiscal pressure is measured and estimated through the fiscal taxation ratio that is established by law or fiscal regulations. It is a fiscal coefficient expressing the very share of the national revenue taken by the state and is calculated as a percentage ratio for tax payments/revenues to the GDP considering. There are three ratios usually employed (low ratios, high ratios and optimum ratios) according to the average values of the fiscal taxation ratios on relatively long term of a certain country or group of countries, and by reference to the average ratios existing at a given moment in the countries at the top of world economy as well. To a certain extent, the present rise of the Romania's economy and social development reflects the existing global tendencies which are materialized in what the specialists call the transitional path towards the informational society, i.e. the society of knowledge and consciousness. As another challenge for the country, the integrative process requires the substantiation of a strategy that aims at gradually catching up with the countries that have developed within normal parameters along the trajectory of social and economic progress. Both support and motivation, the present Romania's struggle for integration in the European Union is actually an effort towards its social and economic second modernity. Being permanently interdependent with other macro-economic processes and policies, tax planning and tax policy play an important role both in ensuring and improving the financial stability and in sustaining an adequate environment for all economic activities. Although their different approaches and methods, tax planning and tax policy deal with the management of the accumulated public financial resources, i.e., the dynamics of fiscal pressure itself. The present study aims at analyzing the impact of fiscal reforms as reflected in the dynamics of the fiscal pressure from the perspective of various tax ratios and also the way it was felt against the integration in the euro zone background. Considering the context of the global financial turbulences, the paper intends to offer a mirror of the efforts Romania made towards the challenge that were faced up to now and that are still to be faced in the years to come.