Economy

Imports
$9.41 billion (2022). Refined Petroleum ($1.45B), Petroleum Gas ($789M), Cars ($396M), Insulated Wire ($238M), and Packaged Medicaments ($230M), importing mostly from Romania ($2.14B), Russia ($1.03B), Ukraine ($929M), China ($754M), and Turkey ($704M).

Financial inclusion factors (over 15 years of  age)
• 64.3% have an account with a financial institution
• 8.1% have a credit card
• 18.4% make online purchases

Ease of doing business
Ease of conducting business is high (rated 74.4 out of 100). Ranked 10th out of 24 European countries. Ranked 48th out of 190 countries worldwide (2022, World Bank).

Exports
$4.94 billion (2022). Refined Petroleum ($564M), Insulated Wire ($511M), Seed Oils ($392M), Corn ($350M), and Sunflower Seeds ($341M), exporting mostly to Romania ($1.35B), Ukraine ($729M), Italy ($352M), Turkey ($309M), and Germany ($267M).

Main local online stores
999.md, aliexpress.com and makler.md, ebay.com and amazon.com

Economic freedom
‘Mostly not free’ (rated 57.1 out of 100). Ranked 40th out of 44 European countries. Ranked 99th out of 186 countries worldwide (2024, Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal).

Global Innovation Index
Ranked 35th out of 39 European countries, and 60th out of 132 worldwide.

The Global Innovation Index captures the innovation
ecosystem performance of 132 economies and tracks the most recent global innovation trends.

Media

Media language
Romenian

Information channels
Television is the most popular medium, although online media are increasingly influential. Politicians and business figures control the main broadcasting outlets. The top TV station is Prime, which rebroadcasts entertainment programmes from Russia’s Channel One alongside its own output. Public Moldova One TV broadcasts nationally. Political battles between the pro-Russia and pro-West camps are played out in the media. A 2017 “anti-propaganda” law bans rebroadcasts of Russian TV news and current affairs and a 2019 broadcasting code says that at least half of the programming bought from foreign broadcasters must come from EU countries. But Russian TV stations themselves remain popular. Moldovan media are blocked in the breakaway Trans-Dniester region and vice versa. Most private FM radio networks rebroadcast output from Russian and Romanian stations. The press divides along party political lines. The overall reach of the press is low and in decline. There is only one daily newspaper, the Moldovan version of a Russian tabloid. The internet is the second most important source of news after TV. Nearly 2.9 million Moldovans were online by 2017 – around 71% of the population (Internetworldstats.com). A 2018 survey found that Facebook is the most popular social network, followed by Russian platform Odnoklassniki and Instagram.

The press

Moldova Suverana – in Romanian
Komsomolskaya Pravda v Moldove – daily, Moldovan edition of Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda
Timpul – weekly, in Romanian

Television

Prime – private, national
Moldova One – public, national
Canal 2 – private, national
Pro TV Chisinau – private; Moldovan outlet of Romania’s Pro TV
Publika TV – private, news-based network
Jurnal TV – private, news and entertainment
TV8 – private

Radio

Radio Moldova – public
Hit FM – private, music
Vocea Basarabiei – private, news/speech
Jurnal FM – private, news/speech

News agency

Moldpres – state-run, pages in English
Infotag – private, pages in English
Unimedia – news site
Tribuna – news site

Internet Data

Internet users
63.5% penetration, 2.14 million

Share of web traffic by device
58.67% mobile phones, 40.29% computers (laptops and desktops), 1.03% tablet devices and 0.01% other devices.

Median speed of mobile Internet connection
29.51  Mbps

Median speed of fixed Internet connection
106.00 Mbps

Mobile connection as a percentage of total population: 125.8%

Percentage of mobile connections that are broadband (3G-5G): 93.6%

Most popular web search engines
Google (93.25%), Yandex (5.49%), Bing (0.72%), DickDuckGo (0.19%), Yahoo! (0.17%), other (0.17%).

Most used social media
Facebook (90.71%),  Instagram (3.2%), Pinterest (2.43%), Twitter (1.78%), YouTube (1.08%), VKontakte (0.41%), Reddit (0.15%), other (0.25%).

Social statistics

Life expectancy
69 yrs (2021)

Corruption perceptions Index
Moldova scored 39 out of 100, ranked 91 out 180 countries worldwide.

Current health expenditure
6.78% of GDP

CO2 emissions
3.3 metric tons per capita

World Happiness Index
Moldova ranked 62 out of 146 countries, with a score of 5.857.

Current education expenditure
90.5% of total expenditure in public institutions