Press review – January 13, 2021

So far, two out of three pre-university employees are willing to get vaccinated against COVID-19, Minister Sorin Cîmpeanu said at Libertatea. It is about 66% of the teaching staff of several schools who answered the questionnaire regarding the availability of vaccination, these are the partial data, the final ones will be communicated on Friday, the minister also said.

Also, in the case of a university, "in the first 40 minutes after the opening of the platform, the ratio was 88% for vaccination, 12% against vaccination", Cîmpeanu also said.

• The answer we will receive at the end of this week, on Friday, regarding the availability of vaccination of education staff will also count in the decision. We have partial data.
• There are situations where, within a university, in the first 40 minutes after the opening of the platform, the ratio was 88% for vaccination, 12% against vaccination.
• We have many pre-university education units that in the first period were somewhere around 66%, so two out of three employees of the education system want to be vaccinated. We also have situations where the vaccination rate is lower.
• I'm not going to prejudge, surveys have already been done on limited samples. On January 15, in the afternoon, at 16:00 p.m., we will have the exact result of the inquiry regarding the vaccination availability of each of the 340.000 employees of the Romanian education system.
• This result does not condition the opening of schools, but I would be happy if we all understand that every teacher who gets vaccinated will mean an increase in school safety for students and teachers.

President Klaus Iohannis declared on Tuesday evening, regarding the change of directors of schools, that the action was not prepared in time by the Ministry of Education and "what was done now was from today to tomorrow, in a rush".

He added that when the first contests for these positions take place, he will monitor how the principle of meritocracy is respected.

Iohannis was asked, in Tuesday's press conference, about the change of some school principals.

He stated that it is an action that was not prepared in time by the Ministry of Education, knowing that the mandates of many school principals ended on January 9, mentioning that for some of them the mandates were extended.

"I think we will be able to talk about a normal Romania and an educated Romania only after we finish with this pandemic, we organize competitions as per the book and then we will return to normality. What was done now was from today to tomorrow, at the rush, or they extended the mandates, or new mandates were given for a few months", said Iohannis.

He added that when the first contests take place, he will follow "very carefully how the principle of meritocracy is respected in these matters".

Teachers and teachers, in their vast majority, do not know pedagogy. Or if they know, they don't apply it. The school hours are dry, the teachers teach mechanically, the students being seen only as receivers of the information provided in the school curriculum. Pedagogy offers the way for the teacher-student relationship to be one through which the teacher skillfully approaches the student's personality, in such a way that he feels that he is not just an anonymous person in the classroom.

The teaching staff in Romania, together with those in Cyprus, have the fewest hours of classroom teaching in Europe. On the other hand, the time devoted to the preparation of lessons is quite generous compared to the European average.

The education system has tens of thousands of substitute teachers, especially in the rural areas, and teachers often get an average of five in the tenure exams. These almost correct educators find their place at the department, in the conditions where many teachers have disappeared from the system, and the number of students in primary and secondary education has decreased in the last thirty years by almost one million.

Statistics show that there are situations where there is only one school psychologist for every 1500 students, in the dramatic situation where the rate of depression among schoolchildren is increasing year by year. In this situation, the average time that a psychologist can use to provide specialized assistance to each student would be a few minutes.

For several years, our country has been at the back of the EU when it comes to digitization and value added tax (VAT) collection, according to studies carried out by the European Commission.

The VAT collection deficit in Romania (the difference between expected VAT revenues and those actually collected) stood at 33,8% in 2018, and for 2020 it is estimated to deepen to 37,4% due to the blockages caused by the pandemic, according to the latest report published by the European Commission.

Therefore, analyzing the impact generated by the implementation of this system in the economies of other states, the introduction of SAF-T can be considered a first step in the digitalization of the fiscal system in Romania, which will lead to an increase in revenues to the state budget, by expanding the degree of collection and reducing the deficit of VAT collection.

However, the effects of the implementation of the new system will be felt only in the years to come.

The SAF-T system undoubtedly contributed to the success of better tax collection in recent years in the states where it was implemented (e.g. Poland), but it was not the only tool used to improve the situation of public finances.

Several EU member states currently use electronic reporting of some documents, carry out online tax controls and operate cash registers with electronic logs.

The labor market has undergone a sudden change in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the effects have been felt without delay by both employers and candidates. Although there were areas and companies strongly affected by the epidemiological crisis, government support measures aimed at preserving labor relations and the sectors that saw significant growth in 2020 counterbalanced the negative impact in the affected areas. Thus, especially in the last semester of 2020, an increase in the number of jobs was observed by 5% compared to the same period last year, in the context in which more and more employers sought to hire personnel from the white collar categories (office employees ) and blue collar (workers).

Of the total active jobs in 2020, more than half (52%) were white collar, 33% were blue collar jobs, while 15% were management and team coordination jobs. Remote jobs, which could be carried out from home (work from home), were the star of the pandemic year so that, in 2020, candidates performed a total of over 600.000 searches for jobs where the daily activity can be carried out from anywhere . Regarding the perspective of remote jobs in 2021, a new increase of approximately 60% compared to 2020 is estimated for white collar jobs in the work from home system. The biggest employers of 2020 were companies operating in fields such as retail, medical&pharma, IT&C, financial-consulting, construction and BPO. Cumulatively, the six fields were responsible for more than 60% of the number of jobs for which employers posted ads on the BestJobs platform between January and December 2020. Even though the pandemic has greatly altered the entire process of recruitment, employers continued to be active in contacting candidates, and in 2020 the total volume of direct contacts from the platform increased by 19% compared to 2019. At the same time, the interest of employees in terms of looking for a new job or, the little, to evaluate the offers of employers increased. In the "pandemic year", the total number of new job applications was 58% higher than in the same period last year. The most searched jobs in 2020 were in fields such as transport - with over 260.000 searches, financial-accounting - with over 250.000 searches, transport - with over 75.000 searches, engineering - with over 54.000 searches, medical&pharma - with almost 180.000 searches, IT&C - with more than 160.000 searches and Sales - with more than 145.000 job searches.

The new framework plans for high school and vocational school have been launched in public debate by the Ministry of Education. It is about the documents that determine which subjects the students will study starting from the XNUMXth grade, as well as the number of hours allocated to these subjects per week.

Cristian Presură, researcher at the Philips company in the Netherlands, draws attention to the fact that the plans contain, for example, more hours of religion than physics and explains - only a high school student with the real theoretical profile will do more hours of physics than religion, all during the 4 years of study. Especially in this complicated health context, where conspiracy theories and fake news abound, it is important to privilege scientific information, believes the researcher who warns that otherwise no state can be competitive worldwide. Correlating the school curriculum to the labor market, textbooks differentiated according to the student's abilities and the practical application of the accumulated notions are other old problems of the Romanian school that should be solved, says Cristian Presură."Scientific information is very important if we want to have a performing economy. We live in a global society where well-being is determined by the performance of the economy. To cope with a global economy, you must have a very efficient economy and in this way you have well-being in your country....Why? Because that's how the global economy works. How do you build a performing economy? You build it on the basis of scientific knowledge.... We are talking about mathematics, physics, biology, all this is scientific information... One of the problems, the one in the short term, is the problem of textbooks. And of the curriculum, which must no longer be old, full of things that the student is not interested in, but useful things for the student, adapted to the concrete reality... The change, if there will be, will be very small, because the system in essence it's the same and the system decides."

The colossal gains made by bitcoin in recent months are increasingly drawing the attention of regulators to the cryptocurrency market, and some market players believe that a new set of regulations could have a positive impact on digital currencies, according to Bloomberg.

Argo Blockchain is a bitcoin mining company, and the company's London-listed shares have risen 1.400% in the past year. Peter Wall, CEO of Argo Blockchain, said he sees bitcoin "going in one direction" as interest in the sector grows and institutional investors exercise that interest. Naturally, the evolution also attracts the attention of the regulatory authorities.

“Like any other sector, it's going to go through a dance with the regulators, kind of back and forth. We think some handrails are good," said Peter Wall.

The regulatory environment for cryptocurrencies is still largely in its infancy, but analysts believe the rules will evolve as the industry grows. Britain's financial watchdog recently banned the sale of cryptocurrency derivatives to retail investors and warned buyers they risk losing all their money.

In the US, many investment firms have tried to create ETFs, but they have been rejected by the Financial Supervisory Authority (SEC).