摘要：The fiscal policy of a country must meet its specific development requirements. In Romania, however, public authorities’ vision was often constrained by the pressing needs specific to transition. Against this particular background, the concern for ensuring public finances sustainability has been, in some cases, overcome by short-term objectives, although entailing longer-term effects.This paper analyzes Romania’s fiscal pattern prior to the crisis, with the aim to highlight the decisions that proved inadequate in terms of their results, thus hindering the efforts of alleviating the effects of the crisis. The study offers a close look at public revenue and expenditure policies and their correlations with the budget balance policy.The general conclusion is that Romanian fiscal policy often proved to be incautious and lacked medium and long-term vision, some contradictory actions being identified: there was no correlation between the number of public sector employees, public sector wages and labor productivity, there was no concern for increasing public revenue collection rate, a positive fiscal impulse was registered on the background of an overheating economy etc. The lack of vision and prudence as well as the instability of public authorities’ fiscal policy prior to the crisis became factors of impact on the amplitude of the crisis, resulting in greater sacrifices to be assumed. Our analysis lead to the conclusion that the erroneous approach to fiscal policy before the crisis forced Romanian authorities to adopt fiscal consolidation measures instead of fiscal stimulus packages during the crisis, which is perhaps the most important lesson revealed.
