Support for establishing a minimum wage-setting mechanism in Romania

The main purpose of this exercise consisted in providing a recommendation for a sound institutional process of minimum wage setting in Romania.

The design of a transparent mechanism for minimum wage setting based on objective criteria, in order to set the grounds for evidence based dialog and decision making is a matter of extreme importance to the wage policy in Romania due to the number of employees who are affected, on one hand, and to the economic and social effects of this form of state intervention on the labour market, on the other.

As a country particularity, in Romania the wage distribution is highly asymmetrical at the bottom, with more than one quarter of the employees (1.3 million persons) being paid at the minimum wage level.