Ioana Petrescu is a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School. Specifically, he is a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. He is also a consultant on taxation and central government reform for several governments in Europe and the Middle East. At the same time, Ioana Petrescu leads the Innovation and Leadership Center within SNSPA. Also, since January 2016, he is a member of the board of Tech Lounge, an NGO that organizes Innovation Labs, a national pre-accelerator of IT business.
Ioana Petrescu is a graduate of Harvard University in the United States. Ioana obtained a master's degree and a doctorate in Economics from this university. After graduating her doctorate, Ioana distinguished herself in the American academic environment from her position as a researcher in Economics and Public Policy at one of the most prestigious American think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. Then, for more than three years, she was an academic and doctoral supervisor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, College Park. In the summer of 2013, after 14 years of study and work in the USA, she returned to Romania to be Prime Minister Victor Ponta's economic adviser on economic issues.
Specializing in public finances, emerging economies and developing countries and national security, Ioana has managed to gain the trust of business, civil society and government colleagues, so after six months of work at Victoria Palace, she was appointed Minister of Finance in March 2014. She thus became the first woman in Romania to be appointed as Ministry of Finance, her term ending in December 2014.
Being a technocratic minister, in a social-democratic government, Ioana Petrescu was a supporter of the business environment and a fighter against tax evasion. Among the successful projects carried out during her term as Minister of Finance are: reduction of social contributions by 5 percentage points for employers, rewriting of the Fiscal Code and the Code of Fiscal Procedure, exemption from taxation of reinvested profit, reduction by 0.5 percentage points of the tax for special constructions (from 1.5% to 1%), the launch of the “Virtual Private Space”, an online communication platform between ANAF and taxpayers, the modernization of the Treasury in order to turn it into a card payment acceptor, the elimination of 92 tax and parafiscal charges, a reform aimed at reducing bureaucracy in the tax framework, laid the foundations of the Tax Lottery project, introduced the cash transaction limit to reduce tax evasion, modernized and strengthened the transfer pricing direction and signed and promoted international treaties to reduce the erosion of the tax base by transferring the profits of multinationals.
Completing her term as Minister, Ioana returned to the Government, as the State Councilor of the Prime Minister, from January 2015 to December 2015. From here, Ioana coordinated the Priority Implementation Unit, a project of the Chancellery meant reform procedures in several key areas of central government. One of the successes of this Unit was the elaboration and approval in the Government of four new laws on public procurement and a strategy for reforming public procurement, a strategy praised internationally, including by the European Commission in its January 2016 CVM. In 2015, she chaired the Council for State Aid Policy Implementation and coordinated bilateral relations between the Government and embassies. Also in 2015, the Government and the President of Romania nominated her for the position of Vice President of the European Investment Bank.
In 2017, she worked as an expert with the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels to finalize the directive on the exchange of data between tax administrations and reduce the erosion of the tax base.
Ioana Petrescu has published several academic articles in prestigious journals on entrepreneurship, taxation and economic sanctions. She also published a book, "Essays in Taxation and International Relations," in 2017. She is currently writing a second book, "Public Policy in Adolescent Democracies." She also frequently contributes to press articles, including Politico and the Hill.