Romania’s fledgling capital markets, previously tarnished by regulatory shortcomings, are becoming more transparent and liquid. New listings, including government and mortgage-backed securities, are forthcoming and one of the region’s biggest private equity deals has just closed.
The past two years have been happy ones for Romania’s nascent capital markets. The tiny Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE), which in 2002 was the sixth-largest bourse in central and eastern Europe, saw its market capitalisation soar from €1.3bn in 2002 to €15.3bn last year (26% of GDP), up from €8.8bn in 2004. The BSE, which is still half the size of Hungary’s bourse and less than one-fifth as big as its Polish counterpart, is now the fourth largest stock market in the region.
