Only 629 firms set up by Romanians who returned home from abroad have filed requests for startup grants, compared to 1,000 grants budgeted for them in the Government’s Start-up Nation 2022 scheme, Startupcafe.ro reported.
Such grants can reach up to RON 200,000 (EUR 40,000) per project.
The Government deferred the deadline for submitting such requests for a month, indicating a lack of interest.
Existent local firms were comparatively more interested: 12,825 of them filed requests for grants, nearly twice the 6,500 grants budgeted by the Government.
The scheme’s budget for the period 2022-2027 is RON 11 bln, out of which the budget for 2022 is RON 1.5 bln: RON 1.3 bln for firms set up by local entrepreneurs and RON 0.2 bln for Romanians returned from the diaspora.
According to estimative open data, some four mln Romanians live abroad, compared to the country’s resident population of 19 mln. The Romanian diaspora is one of the largest in the world.
