Economist and professor of the Faculty of Economics Dejan Soskic has said that he does not agree with the assessment of the representatives of the government that “the public debt of Serbia is not worryingly high”, especially in the conditions of further growth of interest rates, i.e. the price of borrowing on the international market.
“For a country with unfinished reforms, with an inefficient public sector in which potential losses paid in the end by the state (taxpayers) are still often hidden and with an insufficiently competitive economy such as Serbia, the existing level of debt is already high,” Soskic told the Nezavisnist.org portal.
Soskic: Serbia – a vulnerable developing country
He pointed out that when it came to the arrangement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Serbia fell into the category of “vulnerable developing countries”, according to which the IMF offered support programs in a situation characterized by an increase in the price of borrowing on the international market.
“If Serbia had substantially strengthened its economy in recent years, that is, if it had increased competitiveness and entered the surplus zone of the current account balance of payments, as the countries of Central and Eastern Europe did, there would be no need for such an arrangement with the IMF,” he said.
Proof of this, he said, is the fact that the IMF does not have and does not intend to have similar arrangements with the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and other countries, BizLife reports.
