Serbia: expert summarizes 10 years of RR

Serbia gives the picture of an economy trying to break away from the heavy heirloom of the Yugoslav system, and partly succeeding. The recently published Global Competitiveness index, which places it in 90^th position in 144 economies, shows poor scores for institutions and freedom from administrative interference, but good traits emerging for macroeconomic management and education. Not surprisingly, government bureaucracty and corruption still feature are major obstacles to business. Nikola Jankovic from Jankovic Popovic Mitic Law Firm (JPM) gives, in an interview to Balkans.com, a picture of recent progress and its current limits.

“The first wave of the changes included adoption of a number of the new laws which were supposed to bring Serbia closer to creation of the market economy and integration into the European market. First of all, we would like to point out that the Privatization Act from 2001 announced the change of the concept of privatization in Serbia. The said Act introduced the Privatization Agency the aim of which was to operatively manage the process of privatization. Today, the privatization process is at the final stage. Over the previous years a significant step forward has been made in restructuring of the public enterprises, which has resulted in improvement of their financial performances.
The second wave of the changes was marked by continuation of the activities on adoption of the new acts, such as the Companies Act, which has integrated the EU Directives in its original wording, while the intention of the Act on Litigation Proceedings and the Act on the Executive Procedure has been to expedite and increase the efficiency of the litigation proceedings. Besides the said Act, also the Energy Act has been adopted as well as many other Acts.” (The rest of the interview examines the application for EU membership and modernization of regulation.)