Romania has a tiny research&development market with expenditures of 0.48 percent of GDP, compared with 2.03 percent, the EU average.
That is one of reasons the country almost doesn’t matter on the innovation market, new technologies being, usually, brought from other countries or through international companies that enters the market.
According to Eurostat figures from 2017, Romania had 28.2 percent of the employees involved in high technology manufacturing and knowledge-intensive service sector, while EU average is 45.8 percent.
More than that, research&development personnel in EU was, in 2016, 1.2 percent of active population, compared with only 0.37 percent in Romania, and the patent applications of Romanians were only 5.11 per 1 million inhabitants as against 111.3 per 1 million in the EU.
Although Romania has a strong IT side, with around 190,000 employees, the country’s technology market is still behind EU average, and the tech production is in many cases lohn, with low added value and no innovation.