O retrospectivă analitică a contextului crizei datoriei externe a României din anii 1980[A deeper insight into the background of 1980s external debt crisis in Romania]

This study, based on more recent research, including disarchived and / or declassificated information regarding the communist period in Romania, both internally and internationally, focuses on exploring the 1980s external debt crisis context and causes, as well as the impact of internal and external factors, having as intention a reevaluation, closer to the reality, of those times state of affaires. At the beginning of the 1980s, the global economy was marked by a severe economic and financial crisis, the first on global-scale in history, felt by more than 30 developing countries as a balance of payments crisis, which resulted in the renegotiation and rescheduling of their sovereign debt. In the case of Romania, the external debt crisis triggered in 1982 has been aggravated, in an extremely severe manner, by overlapping internal vulnerabilities accumulated in previous decades with external shock caused by the major changes in the global economic, financial and geopolitical context at the end of 1979, which led to the explosive rise in interest rates on loans contracted from private commercial banks under floating interest rates, as well as the introduction of conditionalities on loans granted by international financial institutions. The study conclude that the decision of Romanian authorities to liquidate the external debt and the crisis management errors had a destructive impact on the Romanian economy, degenerated in a system crisis at the end of 1989. Many of the external debt crisis were felt also afterwards, slowing down significantly the pace of the transition to the market economy and the positioning of the country on a sustainable development trajectory.