THE LISTENING ROOM ← Data stories
◆ Quarterly data study · Q2 2026

The Romanian
Behavior Index.

One country, read through the distance between what it says and what it does — across four pillars: Artificial Intelligence, Trust, Economy, Work. Original research; every figure carries a source, a date and a confidence tier.

Aggregate-only GDPR-compliant by design No individual profiling 37-page full edition
Download the full edition (PDF) ↓

01The aggregate

Belief runs outward. Delivery runs behind.
47.6
Overall RBI — the unweighted mean of the four pillar scores. A single pattern crosses all four.

Romanians place trust and hope outward and upward: in the European Union, in the institutions that stand outside politics, in AI as a personal tool, in their own optimism. The national, institutional and structural layer underneath does not keep pace — declared belief outruns revealed capacity. That distance is the index.

02The four pillars

Each score reads the strongest available attitude, behaviour and delivery indicator per construct
Pillar · AI
35.2
Public openness to AI is high and personal use is rising — but organisational capability is the lowest in the Union.
Gap: public openness ▸ organisational capability
Pillar · Trust
41.0
Trust concentrates in what stands outside domestic politics — the EU, the army, the church — while trust in Parliament has fallen to the low teens (11.9%).
Gap: external trust ▸ institutional trust
Pillar · Economy
49.8
Sentiment holds up better than the buffer beneath it: Romania is among the EU's five highest for inability to face an unexpected expense.
Gap: sentiment ▸ financial resilience
Pillar · Work
64.5
The strongest pillar — yet built on labour export: Romania is one of the EU's largest labour exporters, and employer-stated real need runs to the hundreds of thousands.
Gap: labour engagement ▸ domestic delivery

03Method & rigour

How the index is built — and what it refuses to do

Each pillar pairs the strongest available attitude/belief indicator with its behavioural or delivery counterpart; the pillar gap reads declared belief against revealed capacity. Sources are institutional and dated — Eurobarometer, Eurostat, and comparable public datasets — and every figure carries a source reference, a date where applicable, and a confidence tier. Rates that are not population shares (inflation, GDP, headcounts) are reported directly and never folded into a 0–100 index, to avoid false precision. The overall RBI is the unweighted mean of the four pillar scores — a deliberate choice, not a weighting that hides a thesis. Every displayed value is re-derived by an independent verification pass before publication. The study is aggregate-only and GDPR-compliant by design: it describes a population, never a person.

The index is public. A read tailored to your sector is a conversation.

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