The Romanian Government implements various funding schemes through the Ministry of Economy, Energy and the Business Environment in order to support the country’s development, to create and maintain new jobs in the national economy, to integrate the unemployed and graduates into the labour market, to increase the number of newly created SMEs, to increase technological uptake with new, innovative equipment, and to increase the number of SMEs in rural areas.

In Romania, entrepreneurship has been growing in recent years, with increasing numbers of young people choosing to start a business on their own as a valid career alternative. Many of them set off down this path through a start-up business, benefiting from non-repayable funding from the Government.

The Start-up Nation Programme is designed to encourage and stimulate the creation and development of small and medium-sized enterprises and is implemented by the Ministry of Economy, Energy and the Business Environment, in accordance with Government Emergency Ordinance No 10/2017 on boosting the establishment of new small and medium-sized enterprises.

Apart from the funding programme for start-ups, there are other forms of business financing, such as:

• microgrants;
• working capital grants;
• investment grants;
• Female Entrepreneurs programme;
• Trade and Market Services programme;
• micro-industrialisation programme;
• UNCTAD/EMPRETEC programme;
• arts and crafts programme.

At the same time, in order to encourage agricultural activities, the Romanian State makes transitional national aid available to farmers from the national budget in both the crop-growing, and the livestock-farming sectors. Other types of State aid financed from the national budget and allocated through APIA include: state aid for diesel used in agriculture, state aid in the livestock-farming sector, etc.