The minister of European Funds, Rovana Plumb, says that Romania’s absorption of EU funds has reached EUR 5.8 billion, meaning that the country has used 19 percent of all its allocation of EU money.
With the current absorption rate, Romania is placed on the 18th place in the EU, on the same spot with Bulgaria, Hungary and Belgium.
The member states with the best absorption rates are Finland (44 percent), Austria (37 percent), Luxembourg (36 percent) and Ireland (36 percent). Meanwhile, the weakest absorption rates were seen in Malta (12 percent), Italy (13 percent), Croatia (13 percent) and Spain (14 percent).
The financing lines opened locally amount to EUR 24.3 billion compared to EUR 15.9 billion as of June 30 2017. Effective payments to beneficiaries reached EUR 2.4 billion versus EUR 380 million in mid-2017.