The National Bank of Romania disseminated, at the end of 2019, the revised values of balance of payments indicators, international investment position and external debt, for the period 2013-2018, with the publication of the 2018 version of the annual Balance of Payments and International investment Position report , simultaneously updating the interactive database.

The balance of payments adjustments related to the compensation of employees, taxes on wages and social contributions, as well as tourism collected through the ITS and from the NSI were first introduced in the context of the benchmark revision, being included in the data for the reference year 2019 with the publication of the press release Balance of payments and external debt on December 16^th 2019.

Methodological content of the revision and the impact on external statistics

The external statistics, namely the balance of payments, the international investment position, external debt and foreign direct investment have been updated during the benchmark revision of year 2019, as it follows:

1. Current account
   • Goods
     • Updating the value of trade in goods for the period 2016 – 2018, in accordance with the data submitted by the NSI.
   • Services
     • Updating the grossing-up coefficients of the data collected by the Survey on international trade in services – ITS;
     • Tourism – Travel: mainly complementing the existing data sources, such as ITS, by data provided by the National Institute of Statistics (NSI) and data collected from the Eurostat website.
   • Primary income
     • Compensation of employees: registration of gross compensation of employees, mainly on the basis of data collected from the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection (MMPS) and NSI, supplemented with Eurostat data;
   • Secondary income
     • Taxes on income, property and social contributions: registration of taxes on salary and social contributions based on data collected from MMPS and NSI, supplemented with Eurostat data;
2. Financial account
   • Direct investment
     • revision of the stock of intragroup trade credits for the period 2013 – 2017 by estimating them on the basis of the balance sheet data;
     • modification of the data grossing-up coefficients for intragroup loan stocks related to the year 2014, required by the comparison with the DMFAS database, which led to the reclassification of some non-group loans in intragroup loans.
   • Other investment
     • Currency and deposits (inclusion of the EUX balance of payments account, opened by NBR at the ECB, within the participation in the TARGET2 settlement system), for the period 2013-2016;
     • Insurance, pension and standardised guarantee schemes (introduction as data source of the insurance companies' balance sheets) for the years 2016 and 2017;
     • Other external liabilities - liabilities, by stock correction of year 2014 resulting from the reclassification of some non-group loans in intra-group loans.





The revision of the items in the financial account is reflected in the modification of the corresponding components of the international investment position.