Chairman of Serbia’s Fiscal Council Pavle Petrovic said Wednesday that increasing public sector salaries and pensions now would still be economically unsound.
If the salaries and pensions were brought back to the level before the cuts, deficit would also return to the 2014 level of about 6.5 per cent of GDP, which would mean no fiscal consolidation had ever taken place, Petrovic told a press conference.
Under relevant government savings measures, the salaries and pensions above RSD 25,000 (RSD 1 = EUR 0.008) were reduced by 10 percent in November last year, and Petrovic said that increasing them by one or two percent would not make any sense right now.
The fiscal consolidation for 2015 is going a little better than planned, but we still need to wait to start reforms vital to ensuring a permanent recovery of finance, the Fiscal Council chairman said.
Source; SerbGov
