The latest figures publicly presented by Prime Minister Vasile Tofan reveal just how serious the situation surrounding the management of state-owned enterprises has become. While state-owned companies manage assets worth approximately 38 billion lei, the dividends generated over the past year amounted to just 689 million lei. The Prime Minister pointed out that the return on these assets barely reaches 1.8%, and if three major companies are excluded, it drops to just 0.7%.
Prime Minister Vasile Tofan, during a public presentation of the tax policy for 2027, touched upon, amongst other things, the situation in the property market. He noted that the government wishes to curb price rises or even bring them down. Among the factors driving up property prices, the Prime Minister cited expensive building materials, relatively high land costs and labour costs, which have also been rising.
One of the world’s most famous mountaineers, Nepalese climber Nirmala Purja, died in an avalanche while climbing Broad Peak (8,047 m) in the Karakoram range in Pakistan.
Prime Minister Vasile Tofan took the helm of the government during a challenging period for the country. The new cabinet faces a difficult but achievable task: to implement the necessary reforms while maintaining political, economic, and social stability.
This year is shaping up to be a challenging one for the construction and real estate markets. Data for the first quarter of 2026 confirms this negative trend: investment in residential real estate is declining, despite continued high demand for housing.
After two years of significant growth, the situation in the construction market has started to deteriorate noticeably. While the construction market recorded growth of 4.8% in 2024 and 32.2% in 2025, in the first quarter of this year the decline amounted to 12%.
As of April 1, 2026, payments under the state program “Prima Casă” have been suspended. Finance Minister Adrian Havrilice openly stated that the program in its current form is not the best solution. He explained this by the pressure that the program exerts on the real estate market and on the state budget, from which about 150 million lei is allocated annually to support the beneficiaries.
The purpose of this open letter is to highlight the potential economic, fiscal and financial consequences of changing the tax regime for investment gold in the Republic of Moldova, in particular, in view of the possibility of applying a 0% VAT rate to investment gold transactions.
In recent years, the debate on the regulation of cross-border marketplaces such as Temu, Aliexpress and similar platforms has intensified in Moldova in the context of protecting the domestic market and competing with local retail.
Against the backdrop of slowing economic growth, a lack of long-term capital and intense competition for investment between countries in the region, Moldova clearly needs new sources of capital inflows into the real economy. One potentially effective instrument is the investment residence permit.
In recent years, the construction sector and the real estate market of the Republic of Moldova have faced a deep crisis: housing sales have significantly decreased and the growth of prices per square meter continues to outpace the incomes of citizens, which makes affordable housing less and less accessible to young families and the population in general.
Recently, Parliament Speaker Igor Grosu and the chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for Economy, Budget and Finance, Radu Marian, announced a series of measures that will be taken to improve the situation on the real estate market and increase the population’s access to housing.
In recent years, Moldovans are increasingly asking not how to earn more, but how to keep what they already have. Inflation, currency fluctuations, regional instability – all this makes the topic of savings sensitive not only for investors, but also for ordinary families.
In recent days, there has been a lot of press and social media coverage that clearly shows that the downturn in the real estate market is deepening. For example, only 999 apartments were sold in the fourth quarter of last year, 78.5% less than in the same period in 2024. In just one year, the market has lost four out of five real estate buyers.
Dear Mr. Prime Minister!
I decided to address you publicly based on the situation in the real estate market. More precisely, the need to develop new approaches to ensure the widest possible access of the population to quality housing.
The new Moldovan government intends to emphasize economic development. At least, this comes from some of the statements made so far. However, when we talk specifically about economic development, it is also appropriate to ask what model will be chosen. The examples of economically developed countries and regions allow us to identify several possible options.
Today, the question arises more and more often: where will the future government find the finances to cope with the ever-increasing burden on the state budget? Even if the new Cabinet of Ministers has not yet been formed, judging by the information appearing in the public space, everything is going towards the fact that the search for additional sources of funding is one of the main concerns of the ruling party, which will continue to do so.
Moldova’s economy is facing a number of existential problems that limit its opportunities for development and deep modernization. It is all the more important to identify these problems, prioritize them and determine their impact on the development potential. As well as to propose effective and realistic measures to address them. Otherwise, they may become irreversible, when the situation can become virtually impossible to rectify or cost much more than it can be done with timely adoption of the necessary decisions.
Moldova’s real estate market is overheated. This is a given. Specialists and economists speak about it, statistics confirms it.
As a rule, the fiscal and customs policy for the next year is approved/adopted around the middle of the current year or, in some cases, at the end of July, when the Parliament officially concludes its spring-summer session. This is done both to enable the Government in general and the Ministry of Finance in particular to develop the state budget for the next year on the basis of the new fiscal and customs policy, and to enable the business environment to prepare in advance for the new rules that are about to come into force.
