The volume of economic activity, as measured by the turnover of the Romanian companies could decrease this month by 40%, says Tudorel Andrei, the president of the National Institute of Statistics, after compiling the results of an ad-hoc survey among more than 8,800 managers.

”INS is trying to transmit data in near real time to help public policy makers get an idea of the evolution of the real economy. The following figures will be about the contraction of imports and exports during the pandemic, the data being processed,” says Andrei, for Hotnews.ro.

“It is our obligation to give some signals, even if the official statistics cannot provide the next day with data on what happened last week. It is ultimately about adhering to some rigor, some regulations,” says Andrei.

“In relation to inflation, at the National Institute of Statistics we will have the same approach as before. During this period we kept in touch with colleagues from Eurostat and tried to correlate with the other Statistical Institutes in Europe. I personally paid particular attention to the consumer price index. For the data regarding March we will have no problem – here we managed to collect as much as possible the data from the field during the beginning of the pandemic as the restrictions did not appear,” explains the head of Statistics.