table to the Romanian Communist
Party and the government. Lowering the cost of production and improving
quality are considered to be essential prerequisites for expanding
exports, which are needed to pay for imports of materials and equipment.
Various measures introduced since 1967 have not achieved the
government's objectives. Economic plans for the 1971-75 period call for
raising productivity through greater specialization of production and
better utilization of plants and materials. To this end, several new
economic laws were passed in December 1971, the contents of which were
not yet known in early 1972.

NATURAL RESOURCES

Though widely varied, the country's mineral and agricultural resources
are generally inadequate to maintain the current and planned levels of
industrial production and exports. Natural gas is a major exception.
Formerly plentiful supplies of crude oil are falling off, and the
likelihood of discovering new deposits is considered poor by oil
industry officials. The heavy dependence on outside sources of raw
materials led the government to provide economic and technical
assistance to several developing countries for the exploitation of their
mineral resources in return for shipments of mined products. This
dependence has also been a major determinant of the country's political
relations with other members of the Council for Mutual Economic
Assistance (COMECON), particularly the Soviet Union, and with
noncommunist industrial nations of the West (see ch. 10).

Minerals and Metals

Information on the extent of most mineral reserves is unavailable. A
delegation of Western petroleum experts who surveyed the petroleum
industry at the end of 1970 made a tentative estimate that oil reserves
would be exhausted in roughly eleven years at the current annual
production rate of about 13 million tons. With a view to ensuring
long-term crude oil supplies for the planned expansion of the domestic
petroleum refining and petrochemical industries, the government has
entered into economic cooperation agreements with several small
petroleum-producing countries. The government has also discussed the
possibility for joint exploration of offshore petroleum deposits in the
Black Sea and elsewhere in the world with oil interests of various
countries. In the meantime the government has been importing crude oil
from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Libya in exchange for industrial machinery
and equipment. Oil imports from thes