In the race for new investors, the advantage will be given to countries that will be able to provide enough professional staff, digitize more procedures for easier business, but also those that manage to provide more options in the supply chain of basic production raw materials in order to reduce business risks – these are some of the main conclusions of the meeting „Strategic Economic Dialogue“ organized by the Southeast European Business Development Network (SEEBDN) from Vienna.
The president of the Chamber of Commerce of Vojvodina, Boško Vučurović, said that the main task of the chamber is to help companies to get the best and cheapest possible supplies due to the energy crisis affecting the world and rising inflation.
“When the Russia-Ukraine war started, Serbia had no inflationary pressures, and today we have imported inflation precisely because of gas and oil. Despite this, the GDP in Serbia is growing, it has doubled in the last 10 years,” said Vučurović at the meeting in Savudrija. Speaking about gas as the basic raw material that companies think about when deciding which country to move production to, he said that large quantities of gas from Russia pass through the EU, and Serbia is in the middle.
“Serbia has done a lot to ensure energy supply, and we are also working a lot on diversification through Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, and Greece. At the moment, we are using Russian gas, but also Western companies, for example German companies that operate in Serbia and employ around 100,000 people there, use that cheaper gas,” Vučurović said.
At the panel dedicated to digitization as a measure for improving the business conditions of the economy, the executive director of NALED, Violeta Jovanović, pointed out that NALED is proud of the solutions that, in cooperation with the Government of Serbia, it managed to implement.
“A good example is the system of electronic permits, the implementation of which we advocated and helped in Serbia in 2016, which opened the door for similar systems in other areas as well. With such examples, we contribute to bilateral cooperation, the betterment of the whole society and the faster movement of the region towards the EU”, said Jovanović, emphasizing that Serbia, when it comes to digitization of procedures, has political leadership in relation to the region.
Former Prime Minister of Belgium Yves Leterne and former Prime Minister of Montenegro Igor Lukšić participated in this year’s meeting of the SEEBDN organization, who spoke about the expansion of the EU to the Western Balkans. Latern stated that the EU should have expanded to this region more quickly, but also that many issues on both sides have not yet been resolved.
Lukšić said that, when he was prime minister, he believed that it would take ten years for Montenegro to join the EU, but that apparently did not happen. Lukšić said that he believes that it is necessary for the EU to change its approach to the Balkans, actually the accession procedure, that is, to introduce associate membership.
