Romania could collect an additional 11 billion lei in tax revenue each year if the employment rate of its women moved closer to the European average, according to Cristina Chiriac, president of the Confederation of Women Entrepreneurs of Romania (CONAF). The figure is a conservative estimate of potential revenue, not a forecast of what will happen, and Chiriac says reaching it would depend on jobs, skills and care services being in place.
The calculation rests on closing the gap with the EU average, which would mean roughly 643,000 more women in work. Chiriac points to a large pool of women outside the labour market: about 2.5 million are economically inactive, and 1.327 million of them describe themselves as homemakers. Not all inactive women fall into that category, and their reasons for staying out of work differ, a distinction the CONAF research recognises. Treating that group as a single block would overstate the potential, and the estimate is framed accordingly.
CONAF's research, published under the title «România nevalorificată», puts the value of unpaid work in Romania at around 150 billion lei a year. Much of that work is care, and the cost of a place in a creche, estimated at 12,000 to 15,000 lei a year, is one of the obstacles the research identifies for women who might otherwise take paid employment. Based on the research's assumptions, a working woman could generate between 15,000 and 18,000 lei a year in taxes. Set against the cost of a creche place, that comparison is central to the argument that public spending on care can pay for itself through the revenue it enables.
Chiriac also drew attention to pensions. The average pension gap between women and men stands at 1,270 lei a month, and 81.5 per cent of recipients of the social pension supplement are women. The same discussion stressed that the causes of the pension gap are several and not solely the result of unpaid care work, so the figures should not be read as a single-cause problem. A lifetime of lower earnings, interrupted careers and fewer contributory years all feed into the outcome, which is why CONAF links pensions to the wider question of women's labour market participation rather than to care alone.
Chiriac argued that the government has tended to favour tax increases over investment in care infrastructure and employment support, a position she set out as CONAF's view of current policy priorities. In CONAF's account, raising revenue by taxing existing earners narrows the options available to households, while a larger workforce widens the tax base without the same burden. That contrast is the core of the organisation's case to policymakers, and it is presented as a choice about how Romania finances its public budget rather than as a dispute over the size of the budget itself.
The employment argument comes as Romania's wider economic debate continues around fiscal policy and public revenue. CONAF's position is that revenue gains would come from a larger workforce rather than from higher taxes on existing earners, though the organisation's own figures make clear that the gains depend on significant changes in childcare provision and labour market access. Without those changes, the 11 billion lei figure remains a theoretical ceiling rather than an expected result.