Minister of Internal and Foreign Trade Jagoda Lazarević said yesterday that, from September, retailers will be required to publish daily price lists for their products under the laws adopted to regulate the market and consumer protection in Serbia, and said there would be no delay.
“We have high expectations from the Law on Trading Practices. There has been strong pressure, or lobbying, if you will, to postpone the start of the law’s implementation, but we have been absolutely firm and have maintained our position that it must take effect in September, and that is how it will be,” she said at the National Bank of Serbia (NBS) during the presentation of the August 2026 Inflation Report.
Lazarević added that, thanks to the laws adopted and the four-month adjustment period provided for retailers, certain unfair trading practices, which had been among the significant drivers of rising prices, are expected to be permanently banned.
She recalled that the Serbian government adopted amendments to the Law on Trade, which entered into force in May, and the Law on Consumer Protection, which entered into force on August 2.
According to Lazarević, prices for most products remained stable even after the regulation limiting retail margins expired. However, the currently favorable trend in food prices cannot yet be attributed to the full impact of the new laws, as their most important provisions have only just begun to take effect. “We will only see the real effect in the autumn, when the rules are fully implemented, when retailers start publishing price lists daily and when suppliers in the chain also change their contracts,” Lazarević said.
NBS Governor Jorgovanka Tabaković said at the presentation of the August inflation report that some central bank experts, when preparing projections following the abolition of the regulation limiting retail margins, had expected prices to return completely to their previous levels. That forecast was based on the market power of the major retail chains to date, but she did not agree with it. “I said that if we think everything can go back to the way it was, then we are effectively saying that we took a pointless action. I was certain that this would not happen,” the governor said. In her assessment, at most one-third of products could potentially have returned to their previous price levels.
She also stressed that the Ministry of Trade and other institutions had demonstrated determination and authority, which influenced the behaviour of market participants. “I was not right because I was looking into a crystal ball, but because you, and we on our side as well, demonstrated authority,” Tabaković told Minister Lazarević.
Tabaković also announced that the NBS would use an artificial intelligence-based model to monitor prices and produce short-term estimates of price movements. “For our new model, in which we use artificial intelligence and monitor all prices that appear, it will be extremely important to have reliable data from the daily reports,” she added, Tanjug reports. As she stressed, this would allow the central bank to have estimates of the direction in which prices are moving even before the official data are published by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (RZS).
Source: Politika, 19.08.2026