Finance Minister Alexandru Nazare said at the Eurogroup+ meeting that energy, competitiveness and fiscal discipline are interconnected and must be addressed together, not separately.
“Why energy and finance need to be strategically aligned. Today I spoke in Luxembourg at the Eurogroup+ meeting — the forum bringing together finance ministers from euro area and non-euro countries, including Romania — in a discussion on Europe’s economic and financial stability.
My main message was centred on the idea that energy, competitiveness and fiscal discipline are connected and must be addressed together, not separately.
In recent years, Europe has gone through successive crises triggered by the pandemic, the energy crisis and inflationary pressures, and the lesson from all of them is that, in such situations, measures must be firmly targeted at those affected, temporary and compatible with budgetary balance.
Romania applied this approach during the energy crisis, through support measures designed to protect the economy without destabilising the budget. A significant part of the support was channelled to the transport sector, an essential area for the functioning of the economy.
At the same time, at European level we must be better prepared for future crises. Concretely, this means:
better data
genuine digitalisation of intervention mechanisms
and instruments that can deliver support quickly, where it is truly needed.
In this context, I reiterated an essential point: coordination between finance ministers and energy ministers must be strengthened. This is the second time Romania has called at European level for the organisation of joint Finance-Energy councils, because energy is no longer just a technical issue. It directly affects prices and inflation, the competitiveness of economies, investment and national budgets.
For South-Eastern Europe, including Romania, a critical element remains energy interconnection. We cannot talk about real energy security without modern grids,
functional energy corridors and interconnectors that allow energy to reach where it is needed, when it is needed.
An important point on today’s agenda was the intervention of Ms Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, who explicitly took up Romania’s idea that energy and finance need to be analysed together, confirming that this approach is becoming central at international and European level.
Without a common vision between energy and finance, Europe can have neither competitiveness nor genuine economic security,” Nazare said.
