Elections can slow down the country’s economic growth up to five times, according to the calculation of the National Alliance for Local Economic Development (NALED), based on official statistics.
“From 2012 to 2022, we had six years of republican, parliamentary and presidential elections and five years of no elections at all. The average growth rate of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the years without elections was 4.2 percent and was five times higher than in the years when there were elections – 0.75 percent,” states NALED.
Dušan Vasiljević, Director for Competitiveness and Investments at NALED, said that just announcing the possibility of elections will not have a major impact on the performance of the economy.
However, Vasiljević adds, we can expect a suspension of the adoption of laws for about six months, a decrease in the activities of the state administration in performing their daily tasks and a short-term increase in public expenditures in order to win over different segments of the electorate.
Vasiljević reminds that the Serbian regulatory environment in the previous Regulatory Index of Serbia for 2021/22 received a score of 47 out of a maximum of 100, which shows that we are only halfway to the desired standard.
Also, the Serbian government planned to pass 397 laws in 2021, of which 86 were adopted, according to NALED.
Vasiljević does not expect that potential elections will have a greater impact on economic plans because these plans are not made based on election cycles, which are relatively unpredictable in our country.
(RTV, 27.06.2023)
https://rtv.rs/sr_lat/drustvo/naled-izbori-mogu-da-uspore-privredu_1456413.html
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