Previous articles in this series:
Why local elections are more important than they seem: the territory no one is arguing about;
The territory does not start anew after each reform;
Self-government without a self-sustaining economy;
The Road: From the Logic of the Colony to the Logic of Development.
The Mayor as a Deficit Manager
A Depressed Region: A Map Without a Future
Each region has its own scenario
The periphery is not simply the distance from the capital
Digitalization is no substitute for the economy
By all formal criteria, it should not be a depressed region. That is precisely why it was chosen not as an exception, but as a test case: if a region with autonomous status, its own legislative body, a university, an agricultural base, international production ties, and a political voice has failed to become an economically self-sufficient center, then the problem runs deeper than a lack of resources or legal authority.
Over the ten years between the 2014 and 2024 censuses, Comrat lost nearly a thousand residents (from 20,113 to 19,120 people). Gagauzia, as a whole, lost an average of 0.25% of its population annually.
To be fair, it should be noted that population decline has been recorded in all regions of the country without exception. But the issue is not the decline itself, but its composition: those leaving are predominantly skilled people of working age. This is not a demographic fluctuation, but a degradation of the region’s human capital.
Gagauzia’s share of the country’s industrial production has remained stable at just over 3%. The budget also remains externally funded: the transfer to the Comrat mayor’s office from the autonomous region’s central budget amounts to 719,400 lei, a sum comparable to the cost of a single small infrastructure project.
Across Moldova as a whole, the share of local budgets’ own revenues stands at 7%, compared to an average of approximately 30% in Southeast European countries; 94.7% of municipalities depend on central government transfers even for their basic operations.
Why Assets Are Not Working
Comrat’s problem is not a lack of resources. The problem is the absence of a strategy that transforms resources into economic function.
The Gagauz Autonomous Region was created as an instrument of political settlement, not as an economic tool for development. The People’s Assembly, the Executive Committee, and the Bashkan are entities with formal powers, but their budgetary dependence on the central government reproduces the same logic: the transfer sets the agenda.
Political status is used primarily for symbolic conflicts with Chisinau, rather than for negotiations on a special economic package.
In a context where 7% of own-source revenue is the Moldovan norm, the mayor inevitably transforms from a development strategist into a deficit manager. His working horizon is determined not by a ten-year investment scenario, but by the search for transfers, grants, and donor-funded projects for the current year.
This is not the fault of any one individual, but rather a systemic trap: with 80.5% of municipalities lacking project management specialists, the grant-based economy cannot compensate for this strategic weakness.
Comrat is located 100 km from Chisinau and a few kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Both factors should work to the city’s advantage. But the R34 highway primarily facilitates commuter traffic and the outflow of young people, rather than an inflow of investment. The border has not become an export corridor because there is no logistics infrastructure.
Comrat’s peripheral status is not geographical. It stems from the region’s inability to retain economic flows within its territory.
The real sector (agriculture and industry) accounts for up to 30% of Gagauzia’s GRP, but the export structure—grain, sunflower seeds, and bulk wine—reveals a classic raw materials trap: the region produces raw materials, while processing, branding, logistics, and financial margins remain outside the region.
Given that in the autonomous region there is practically one non-working person for every employed person, this indicates a lack of a job multiplier effect.
Comrat State University, founded in 2002, is a potential foundation for development. In fact, it functions like a pump: it draws young people from the region, improves their skills, and directs them to where there are jobs.
But without ties to local manufacturing and local businesses, the university merely perpetuates the outflow. A similar logic applies to garment factories that fulfill orders for Turkish, Italian, Belgian, and American firms: this creates real employment, but it’s at the bottom of the supply chain, where design, branding, and profit margins remain outside the region.
What Komrat Does Have
The city has all the formal prerequisites for development: approximately 150,000 hectares of farmland, 26,000 of which are orchards and vineyards; a university with a twenty-year history; autonomous status and political agency; a garment manufacturing industry with access to foreign markets; a geographical location at the crossroads of routes to Chisinau and the Ukrainian border; and a cultural identity and external ties, including partnerships with foreign donors.
Today, all these assets are used in a fragmented manner—as raw materials for sale, as a channel for brain drain, and as a platform for symbolic conflicts with the central government.
Therefore, the task is not to find something new, but to bring together what already exists into a unified economic framework.
Scenario: An agro-industrial, educational, and logistics hub for the south
This is not a return to the Soviet past, nor is it an abstract slogan; rather, it is a new configuration of existing assets under a unified economic function.
Key principle: every element must be linked to the others. The university must be linked to production. Production must be linked to processing. Processing must be linked to exports. Exports must be linked to the local budget. The local budget must be linked to infrastructure. Infrastructure—with investment.
Only then does the region cease to be a collection of disparate elements and become an economic system.
Five Areas of Development
First —the agro-industrial cluster: processing lines for wine, juices, concentrates, dried fruits, and canned goods; refrigeration and storage facilities located at the production sites; certification laboratories compliant with EU standards; cooperation among producers for shared access to processing and distribution; export of wine under a local brand, rather than in bulk.
Second —a university integrated into the region’s specialization, rather than one that merely exists alongside it: training food industry technologists, precision agriculture agronomists, and logistics and export specialists; applied research tailored to the needs of local agribusiness; a technology park where graduates can stay and work rather than leave; subsidized entry-level jobs in the real sector.
Third— a logistics hub for the south: a terminal for sorting, packaging, and shipping agricultural products; electronic customs clearance and a simplified procedure for small-scale exports; transport corridors to Romania, the Balkans, and Turkey—regions where Gagauzia already has trade and cultural ties.
Fourth —an industrial site with engineering infrastructure: electricity, water, roads, internet, a single point of contact for investors, and tax incentives for businesses that create added value within the region rather than outside it.
Fifth —political status as a negotiating tool, not a source of symbolic conflict: a special tax regime for the autonomy’s agricultural processors, targeted funding for agricultural logistics infrastructure as part of the state’s investment policy, and the inclusion of the university in a national education program tailored to the needs of agricultural regions.
What Needs to Change in Governance
At the Comrat level itself—an investment office serving as a single point of entry for investors instead of having to go from office to office; real control by the mayor’s office over land for production projects; regular monitoring of employment, value added, and the tax base—there can be no strategy without data; a transition from an annual budget cycle to a ten-year scenario-based planning process that is not rewritten with every election cycle.
In relations with the central government—a negotiating position not as a request for help, but as a proposal for partnership: here is our specialization, here is our infrastructure deficit, here is the tax impact, here is what the autonomous region will take on, and here is what we need from the state.
A mechanism whereby a portion of the increased tax revenue from new businesses remains in the local budget would create an incentive to develop the economy, rather than merely receiving transfers.
And direct access to investment funds—without having to go through central ministries every time.
Risks That Cannot Be Ignored
Gagauzia is one of Moldova’s most climate-vulnerable regions; droughts recur every three to four years, and an agricultural model without irrigation, adaptive crop varieties, and insurance instruments will perpetuate vulnerability rather than foster resilience.
The war in Ukraine has altered the transit dynamics of the south, closing off part of the northern corridors, but at the same time has opened a window for a shift toward the Balkan and Turkish routes.
Relations between Chisinau and Comrat periodically become strained for political reasons, and the economic model must be structured to continue functioning even as the political climate shifts.
Meanwhile, population decline has already reduced the potential labor force—meaning that investments without programs to bring young people back will create a bottleneck: the issue is not only about jobs, but also about quality of life, the urban environment, and prospects for children.
In Conclusion
Comrat does not need yet another development strategy with fancy tables and lofty goals—there are already enough such documents in Moldova. Comrat needs integration: so that its existing elements—the university, agricultural base, political status, industrial ties, and geographic location—begin to function as a unified system, rather than as disparate components within a single administrative framework.
This requires more than just decisions at the city level. It requires the central government’s willingness to engage the region in a substantive economic dialogue—not about flags and powers, but about processing, human resources, logistics, infrastructure, and the tax base.
If such a dialogue takes place, Comrat could become not merely the administrative center of the autonomous region, but a genuine economic hub for southern Moldova. Not because someone in Chisinau or Comrat wants it, but because all the necessary conditions are in place—except for one: the decision to bring them together.
This is our final article on administrative-territorial development, in which we have attempted to demonstrate how administrative-territorial reform should be structured—one aimed at development rather than squandering the budget.
We used Comrat as an example. The very last step will be an analysis of the CALM strategy.
Eugen Perestoronin,
journalist, economic and political analyst
Dmitri Taraburca,
economist, expert in real estate and territorial development
