MAIN THREATS TO THE ROMANIAN LABOUR MARKET IN THE CURRENT CONTEXT

The paper’s topic is focused on the Romanian labour market prospects, which is going to be affected by two main threats: aging and population decline. These two factors are supposed to dramatically change Romania’s economic structure. It is therefore necessary to know how they will evolve in the next decades, facts which represent the main objective of our article. These topics are debated at large scale at the European and national level, because they describe a process which implies European Union as a whole. The methodology used in order to quantify this phenomenon includes statistical methods (correlation analysis and descriptive statistics). We have used data available at national and European level in order to build a proper argumentation. The results obtained are worrying because there is a high risk to assist at an accelerated aging of the Romanian people, doubled by a very low birth rate. This might create huge problems in the economic and social system due to productivity decrease and the pressures on the pension’s funds. The paper offers scientific arguments for developing macroeconomic policies in order to prevent the negative situation in which we could be within less than 40 years. As a comparison term we brought into attention the Germany situation, country which offers economic equilibrium to the EU, but is also affected by aging. The manner in which this problem has been approached is an original one because we tried to put Romania’s situation into the context of the European Union general situation, the threat being emphasised by the fact that it is going to be a trend for the whole continent. Actually, if it is not taken adequate measures, we will be confronted with a demographic crisis, much worse than the current financial one, because the effort of the country to reverse a birth rate decreasing trend with an aged population will take decades