Nikola Jovanovic from the Centre for International Cooperation and Sustainable Development (CICSD) says that the fact that the current government portrays Serbia as a country of cheap labour is a direction that will only lead us to poverty.
He adds that Serbia needs an alternative strategy, and that the countries like Ireland, the Czech Republic and Israel should be our role models.
In his text titled “The Crucial Task of Our Generation”, which he wrote for the Politika daily, he underlined that Serbia needed investments with a high added value and of higher work complexity.
“We should look up to the countries like Ireland, the Czech Republic and Israel, and not Bangladesh”, Jovanovic writes and adds that the current government could govern and manipulate people easier if it kept them worrying about existential problems.
Jovanovic also says that “over 2.5 million people (in Serbia) lives in poverty with a monthly income of under 15,000 dinars”, and that “the average salary of a qualified worker in Serbia is just under 30,000 dinars”.
“Over 100,000 people who have permanent jobs have not received salaries in months. Actually, in companies founded by foreign investors, the minority of workers are there permanently”, Jovanovic adds.
He goes on to say that Fiat has been compensating for “higher transport costs due to non-functioning railway” by “paying the workers little and not paying dividends into the state budget”.
“It would be much more profitable if the state were to provide the require infrastructure to foreign investors, that could be used by our citizens once the investors leave, rather than giving them direct subsidies and hiding contracts it concluded with them”, Jovanovic says.
(Naslovi.net, 31.07.2017)
This post is also available in: Italiano