Priorities in Education Sector Financing under the Draft 2018 State Budget
Automatically translated summary. The full text is available in Romanian.
This note by the Independent Think Tank “Expert-Grup” examines how public spending on education has evolved and which priorities the draft 2018 State Budget Law proposes to finance. It compares them with the 2018-2020 Medium-Term Budgetary Framework, the Government's 2016-2018 Activity Programme and the 2017-2019 Association Agreement action plan.
The explanatory note does not specify the main reform actions. Its key education measure is teacher pay rises, which merely comply with a legal provision rather than amount to a complex reform. Other changes include MDL 499.3 million for salary measures, MDL 60.4 million for children's meals, MDL 55.3 million in earmarked transfers to local budgets, MDL 24.6 million for capital investment and MDL 15.9 million for higher scholarships. Unlike in previous years, it gives no details on scholarship beneficiaries or whether the meal allowance is sufficient.
With a moratorium on revising school network optimisation and pay rises as the main priority, most education spending remains recurrent rather than reform-oriented. The priorities in the Medium-Term Budgetary Framework, the Government's action plan and the Association Agreement plan are not fully reflected in the draft budget, although they recur in policy documents year after year. The study was funded by Soros Foundation-Moldova.
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