roem

The research behind the site

The Romanian Economic Monitor is a research project run by the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The team publishes data on the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic in Romania on a daily basis, and the stated purpose is to give economic and policy decision makers a precise and regularly updated picture of the current situation. The README describes the site as offering comprehensive and relevant interactive infographics that refresh every day, with the broader goal of protecting society, employees, companies and supply chains by supporting forecasting scenarios. The project materials are written in Romanian, English and Hungarian, which reflects the local academic audience as well as international readers. The work is attributed to UBB-FSEGA for the English and Romanian citations and to BBTE-KGTK for the Hungarian one, both dated 2020. The project frames itself as a support tool for decision makers rather than a finished forecasting product, and it points readers toward background studies that help build prediction scenarios.

How the data is organized and shared

The project keeps a data repository that a bot account named roeimbot updates every day, and the repository holds the data shown on the site in a standardized format. The README links to a wiki page that explains the data layout in detail, so someone who wants to build a similar site or reuse the numbers can follow the documented structure. The site itself is built with web technologies that the wiki covers, and the team asks users to report bugs or suggest features through the project issues page rather than through direct messages. Contact information is split by role: technical and visualization questions go to one maintainer, while economics content and collaboration requests go to Levente Szasz at the university. The data and visualizations are released under an MIT attribution license, which means anyone may use the site as an information source or reuse the charts and data as long as they provide attribution. The citation style is spelled out for all three languages so academic and policy work can reference the monitor consistently.

Who maintains it and how to cite it

The maintainer list names several people affiliated with the university, including Balint Csaba, Csala Denes, Csiki Otto, Nagy Balint Zsolt, Racz Bela-Gergely and Szasz Levente, with LinkedIn profiles linked for each. The README is explicit that the content is free to use under the MIT attribution license, and it gives three ready made citation formats, one in Romanian, one in English and one in Hungarian, each pointing to the same URL at econ.ubbcluj.ro/coronavirus with a last accessed date left for the user to fill in. A starchart widget tracks stargazers over time, which is a small signal of community interest rather than a measure of data quality. The project homepage is econ.ubbcluj.ro/coronavirus, and the repository carries 23 stars and 5 forks at the time of this writing, with 11 open issues. The practical takeaway is that the monitor is a documented, openly licensed source of Romanian pandemic economic data rather than a commercial dashboard.

Editorial conclusion

The monitor is published at econ.ubbcluj.ro/coronavirus, the daily data lives in a repository updated by the roeimbot account, and everything is released under an MIT attribution license that asks only for citation.