Yeaaaah, totally, thriving... Like today and yesterday half of the cluj smelled like sh* bc they stole eu money for development of trash recycling and processing bc there's a trash landfill nearby the city, or when public central park is fully blocked for several days yearly due to a private event. Or Bucharest, most congested capital/city in Eu, with annual problems of hot water supply and annual problems related to trash burning by roma ppl Or iasi where organised crime by (some) roma ppl is pretty harsh. Also I can't imagine how safely a girl can feel walking alone in the night in any of these cities (maybe except cluj, but even here there are a lot of dangerous regions).
I would hardly call these cities thriving, compared to say Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Frankfurt, Zurich, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, etc...
I even remember a recent news that a drugged guy that was 'checked by police' several times, they found drugs but didn't want to test him for drugs, killed a bunch of ppl with his car. Or the case where a lot of ppl burned alive in a club bc of the way it was designed and till today nobody's imprisoned, or when a bridge collapsed right before a school bus(bc they've stolen the money), there wasn't tragedy, but it could have been, and still, nobody in prison. Totally thriving county!
The problem is it's not reflected in day to day life. In most part bc of the corruption. Cities are designed poorly, quality of services is poor(education, medicine) compared to other eu members, there's a big car dependency problem... I can't wait to emigrate (
Sad and kind of surprising given that Romania's economy looks good on paper. Maybe the per capita GNP is increasing because people are emigrating, therefore capital per capita is increasing.
I consider corruption and quality of services "easy" problems if your economy is growing and your democracy is improving, you just need time. The richer you are, the less likely are you to accept bribes.
City design can be a harder problem depending on the specifics
but ultimately still solvable with time.
Population decline due to emigration seems like the biggest problem but maybe it will naturally self-correct, I don't have a clear opinion on this. I live in the Czech Republic and I have to say we're lucky we evaded the emigration curse that's affecting most ex-Eastern Bloc countries.
