The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship in Romania

At the beginning of 2020, a virus originating from Wuhan, China, spread throughout the world, which in March of the same year was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. According to scientific studies and specialized publications, the pandemic had positive effects on the pharmaceutical industry and e-commerce, which accelerated the digitization process. The negative effects of the coronavirus pandemic consisted in the reduction of companies' revenues, the reduction of the number of customers, the reduction of investments and the temporary suspension of production. The research of this paper is descriptive, based on statistics and data from the official reports of the National Trade Register Office. The methods used are observation, analysis, data processing and synthesis. The aim is to identify the number of new investment sectors, newly established enterprises, companies that suspended their activity and those that entered insolvency in the period 2020 and 2021, compared to 2019. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic on entrepreneurship in Romania was not devastating, the entrepreneurs keeping their confidence in the stability of the market. Thus, in 2020, the company establishment rate was affected, because new entrepreneurs no longer had the courage to invest their money, but the companies already present on the market were not strongly impacted. The year 2021 is the surprise year, being the most favorable for entrepreneurship in the period 2019-2021. The most companies were established, and the rate of suspension and insolvency was the lowest. The contribution in this paper consists in the fact that it is demonstrated that the pandemic did not destroy the entrepreneurial activity in Romania. On the contrary, there was a sector, Information and communications, which experienced rapid development, thus developing the concept of "knowledge economy" in this country.