Originally Posted by
Snowraven
I partially agree. First, I am from Romania. Let's get this out of the way.
Now, I don't think it was the economy that was the problem, but the corruption. Romania has extremely corrupt politicians and leadership. This created huge problems. The EU tried to prop us up, they gave us several hundreads of millions of euros to make projects and improve our lives... we took some 5%. Because corruption stopped the rest.
This was actually the last most important issue still needed to be resolved before we were admitted, the EU thought we'd fix it but they should have kept us out till we did, at least partially. Once we found ourselves in the EU, the people in leadership here continued their corruption since there was no reason anymore to try and stop it, our goal had been accomplished.
If the corruption had been lower, we'd have actually took more of those money (Poland did ok on that aspect and the improvements in their nation are quite visible) and started improving. We still would not be on the footing of ... England, but we could at least say we're about the same as Hungary, maybe Austria. But corruption remained, so we're not even close.
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Well, while I'm sorry that our ambassadors of our culture are beggars I need to ask, why aren't you kicking them out? Or imprisoning them, don't know what your law says. In the end, Romania isn't a police state to control every single person leaving and we can't send our police to Sweden to get them.
Also, for all those beggars that are clearly Romanian there's some highly educated people living there that know your language or English at least that never state they're Romanian. You'd be surprised.