SOCOL CRISTIAN| MARINAS MARIUS MINIMUM WAGE AS A PUBLIC POLICY INSTRUMENT – PROS AND CONS and 38.2 in Serbia, way above the EU28 average of 31(Figure 4). In addition to that, Romania experiences a deep polarization of the population's income distribution – a ratio of the income of the richest 10% households to that of the poorest 10% of 13.4, compared to 6.5 in Hungary and 8 in Poland. Figure 4. Income inequality in selected EU/non-EU countries expressed as GINI coefficient(2015) 40 37.0 37.4 37.9 38.2 34.0 34.2 34.6 34.8 35.4 35 32.4 29.2 30.1 30.6 30.6 31.0 30 28.2 25.0 25 20 public ngari y Fran ce rman y a t ia Cro Pol and Eu 28 Ital y rtugal ece a in nia Gre Sp tvia aria nia nia Esto L a ulg m a itua Serbia ch Re Hu G e Po B Ro L Cz Source: Eurostat, 2016 e The third basic reason for implementing an adequate minimum wage is the inequitable distribution of the net national income between labor and capital. While in developed countries the 50-55% of the GDP goes to employees' compensations, 35/40% to capital and 10% to net indirect taxes, in Romania, we see quite the opposite, as in 2015 only 33% of GDP was allocated to the remuneration of employees, 55% to capital and the rest to indirect taxes minus subsidies. Moreover, the public intervention for a greater increase of the minimum wage in the recent years was also determined by the need to correct an imbalance associated to the crisis, since the employees carried a significant part of the burden of recession(the share of employees' remuneration in GDP dropped from 42% in 2008 to 32.3% in 2015, according to Eurostat). the share of employees' remuneration in GDP in 2015 was 42.3% in Hungary, 37.4% in Bulgaria, and 37.2% in Poland. The fourth reason is related to the fact that the benefits of the economic growth are asymmetrically distributed in Romania and the social lift(the advancement to a higher income decile) is slow. Although the GDP rose by 28% in Romania from 2007 to 2015(from EUR 125 billion in 2007 to RON 160 billion in 2015), the rate of poverty and social exclusion risk dropped by only 18.5%(from 45.9% in 2007 to 37.4% in 2015). Analyzing only the gross wages and other wage benefits, we see that 84% of population(the first 8 deciles associated to households, D1...D8) earn as much as 16% of population(the last deciles, associated to the richest households, D9+D10). The social lift is slow, considering that the income transition to a higher decile every 3 years applies only to 13.2% of the total population, below the EU average of 16.3%(of the EU member countries, only Estonia and Latvia rank lower than Romania, with 12% and 13%, respectively)(Figure 5). 13