Economists in Serbia have estimated that some of the results the Serbian government has achieved during the pandemic are good, but not as impressive as the government’s makes them out to be.
Prime Minister Ana Brnabić said that “the government has achieved impressive results in difficult circumstances” in the fight against the pandemic, the fight against organised crime, European integration and the economy.
Ljubodrag Savić, professor at the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade, says that the government of Serbia has achieved more than it expected under difficult circumstances and has done well, but the results are far from impressive because no country in the world has managed to achieve impressive results.
“The government has managed to implement a series of assistance measures for businesses and citizens which cost 14% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in two years, and the public debt still does not exceed 60% of the GDP. We are going through the pandemic much better than more organised countries,” Savic said. According to him, public investments have also increased by about 6-7% and their share is now 23% of GDP, less than in Central and Eastern European countries, where they range from 25-28% of GDP.
The expert commends road construction because Serbia is a bottleneck as far as rail and road traffic is concerned, but he does not understand why domestic companies do not participate in construction anymore and why there are delays in the construction of some motorway sections due to problems in project documentation and expropriations.
Professor Goran Radosavljevic, on the other hand, said that no significant results have been achieved in the fight against the pandemic, organised crime and the European integration process, and that mediocre results have been achieved in the economy, but the question is how sustainable they are.
“We see no results in the fight against the coronavirus as the mortality rate is high, and the situation has never been worse in the fight against organised crime,” Radosavljevic underlines.
(N1, 02.11.2021)
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