Employment Dynamics in Romania After the Crisis. A Global Value Chains Perspective

After the 2008-2009 crisis, the challenge of understanding the mechanisms and structure of the world economy has begun to generate different approaches of economic globalization. This article uses Global Value Chain framework to examine the impact of the crisis on sectorial employment for six selected industries from Romania (Basic Metals and Fabricated Metal, Electrical and Optical Equipment, Transport Equipment, Machinery, Textiles and Textile Products, Chemicals and Chemical Products). With more than 70% of Romanian exports, and almost 14% of the employees these were the main real transmission channels for the crisis, other than financial markets. The study found that dynamic of the employment in these sectors has a different pattern than the national one. Employment in the sectors which are parts of Global Value Chains was very sensitive to global crisis: the average number of employees dropped by 15% in 2009 (comparing to 10% - the percentage for the whole economy) but they didn’t follow the national recovery trend (in 2013 the total number of employees increased by more than 11% in Romania but the numbers stayed almost the same in the six selected industries). These findings suggest that Romania need to understand the specificity of these trends and to use the right policy tools in order to achieve economic growth and development through participation in Global Value Chains.