The new restrictive anti-pandemic measures are once again affecting already unstable economies throughout Europe, with some of them being important economic partners of Serbia.
“The impact of lockdown is undoubtedly negative. As the orders from these countries decrease, that negatively affects the production capacity will be lower, as well as the volume of export activities”, Sasa Djogovic, author of the publication “Macroeconomic Movements in Serbia”, told Biznis.rs.
The poor epidemiological situation in Italy during the three months, from the end of winter until the end of May this year, has led to a sharp drop in Serbian exports to that country.
“Goods worth one billion euro were exported from Serbia to Italy in the first three quarters of this year, which is a 25.7% decline, relative to the same period last year,” says Djogovic.
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In addition, there is a very pronounced decline in export to the Montenegrin market (-17.9%), which is a consequence of the collapse of tourism, as the country remained closed mostly during the spring and most of the summer months.
The hope remains that the closure of the European economies, especially those of Germany, Italy and Austria, will not last long.
As Djogovic says, the epidemiological situation in Serbia is very bad, but another lockdown would be disastrous for the national economy because it would reduce budget revenues, thus increasing the budget deficit, set at 8.8% in the latest budget review.
Economists agree that increasing public sector wages would be a bad decision at the moment and that a more efficient measure would be a one-time bonus for employees, since that would not affect the budget too much.
(Nova Ekonomija, 18.11.2020)