In Romania, 1.9-2 million people work illegally, said Ionuc Dumitru, chief economist at Raiffeisen Bank. According to him, most of the illegally employed are in trade, industry, construction and agriculture.

“It is possible that wages in the manufacturing sector are somewhat better than the official figures show, based on the gap we see between the number of officially paid workers and the number of informally paid workers,” he said at a conference organized by CursDeGuvernare.ro.

The economist also noted that in Romania we have 12,265,000 people in the 15-64 age segment, of which 5.4 million are workers with a work permit at the level of 2022.

“We still have 1.2 million in surplus who do not pay taxes at all. There are another 1.1 million employers, self-employed, over 400,000 unemployed and 4 million inactive. Of the 5.4 million people who have a work permit, some of them work in the public sector: 1.2 million people,” Dumitru also noted.

On public sector wages (where labor market pressures also come from), he says that public administration and defense are certainly, in relative terms compared to the average for the economy, the sector that has the best pay compared to European nations .

“Note: the economy average may be understated because we have those 2 million people on or near the economy minimum wage. We know that a large number of them are receiving gray payments because of this imbalance that we have from the taxation of labor and capital. It is fiscally cheaper for the employer to take dividends and pay the employee in an envelope, leaving him at or close to the minimum wage in the economy,” the economist explained.