The paper characterizes five operational versions of the macromodels of the Romanian transition economy, elaborated during 1995-2000 years. • The first (1996) was finalized after the author’s visit at the Hoover Institution. This version, as well as the following ones, took into consideration the peculiarities of transition economies, which can be regarded as, at least in the case of Romania, a weakly structured system. The main relationships of the macromodel referred to real output, consumption, investment, foreign trade, labour force, labour productivity, exchange rate, price indices, labour income, general consolidated budget, interest rate, and other monetary variables. • The second operational version of the macromodel (1997) underwent some changes as introduction of a special block for demographic variables, and the connection of the annual indicators to a monthly block for the evolution of export and exchange rate. Beginning with this version, there were published systematically predictions in the Romanian Journal of Economic Forecasting. • The third operational version (1998) modified the previous as follows: a) improved estimation of the expected income of households, firms, and public budget; b) delimitation of the most important consequences of the budget deficits; c) more detailed elaboration of the possible scenarios concerning the future evolution of the Romanian economy. • The fourth version (1999) was characterized by such: a) the determination of the real output for the entire economy, without branch division; b) the estimation of the main components of the domestic aggregate demand (absorption) using econometric relationships; c) the determination of export using exclusively relationships reflecting the market conditions. • The fifth version of the macromodel (2000) introduced relationships concerning foreign direct investment, non-reimbursable foreign loans, public debt and total external debt. It was divided into three main blocks: a) output and absorption (aggregate demand); b) production factors and labour income; and c) financial and monetary variables. The 2000 version has been used in projection of the “Romania’s medium term economic strategy” for integration into European Union. The estimations of its subsequent updated forms (during 2001-2004) were included into yearly national “Pre-Accession Economic Programmes” of Romania. • The series of the 1996, 1998, and 2000 operational variants have been presented in the „Journal of Economic Literature (Volume 35, no. 2, June 1997, Volume 37, no. 1, March 1999, and Volume 39, no. 2, June 2001). This series was also awarded in 2001 The Prize of the National Bank of Romania.
