Ioana Petrescu, age 35, is a Romanian economist and Harvard Ph.D., who served during part of 2014 as Romania's first female Minister of Finance.
To accept that important post abroad, she was granted a leave-of-absence from her recent faculty appointment at the University of Maryland's School of Economics.
In Romania she was relentlessly ridiculed and satirized in the press as being naive and "dangerously unprepared" for issues concerning Romania's economy.
However, after pointing out that the government's records of taxes paid by citizens were mostly nonexistent, she instituted a national program to computerize the country's tax-collection system, resulting this year in significant increases in tax compliance and greater revenues for the Romanian government.
A revised Fiscal Code, approved by Parliament this week, reduces the tax rates for individuals, increase retirees' pensions, and raises the salaries for teachers and for physicians, among other measures, according to press reports.
And today Ioana was appointed Vice President of the European Investment Bank, where her salary will be 35,000 euros-per-month (i.e., USD $39,024 monthly).
That's enough to pay off, within this current year, any student loans she might have incurred by attending Harvard. :-)
ALLAN CRUSE
04 SEP 2015