Serbia and Northern Macedonia have good economic cooperation and despite last year’s crisis and declining trade, we expect it to grow slightly this year as well as the level of investment, the director of the Sector for Strategic Analysis, Services and Internationalization at the Serbian Chamber of Commerce (SCC) Mihailo Vesovic told Tanjug.
“The crisis did not bypass the economic cooperation between Serbia and Macedonia, so last year we had a drastic drop in trade of about 20 percent in the second quarter. However, the first quarter was significantly better, because we had an increase in trade, and when we reduce it last year, trade cooperation dropped by 4.6 percent. Exports fell by 4.1 percent, and imports by about 3.1 percent,” said Vesovic.
He specified that Serbia has a significant foreign trade surplus with Northern Macedonia and that the current exchange of goods is worth around 860 million euros, and that the exchange of services remains at the level of 2019, which also means that we have a surplus.
“We are an extremely important foreign trade partner for Northern Macedonia, we are in their second place, they are important to us, because Macedonia is among the top ten export markets in Serbia,” Vesovic specified.
He assessed that currently the economic cooperation between the two countries is stable and that if there are no serious disturbances during this year, a gradual growth of exchange can be expected.
“The biggest drop in exports during the Covid crisis in 2020 was suffered by the metal industry, chemical and food industry, considering that they are also the most significant in trade exchange,” said Vesovic.
He emphasized that over 4,000 companies on both sides of the border participate in trade, and that Macedonian citizens are the majority owners in more than 500 companies in Serbia.
The PKS official says that the level of mutual investments is slowly growing every year.
“These two markets know each other very well. Businessmen very often work together and traditionally open some new areas. I expect that we will have a higher level of Serbian investments in Macedonia in the areas of food and confectionery industry, all the way to sophisticated areas such as IT and telecommunications, because Macedonia is also a country with a very large number of startups and new technology companies. It has attracted a large number of investments from the EU in the automotive industry, which is important, because there are supply chains between our two countries with the goal of exporting finished products, most often to the EU,” Vesovic said.
According to him, concrete results have been achieved in the realization of the Mini Schengen initiative.
“One of the good results aimed at the free flow of people, goods, capital and services is the joint crossing Tabanovce – Presevo, which has been improved to such an extent that we can say that there is practically no slowdown in the flow of goods at the borders. Although not everything is perfect because there are occasional problems in some areas, primarily in the export of food products, but it is something that such initiatives aim to solve quickly,” said Vesovic.
He emphasized that the Chamber of Commerce of Macedonia and PKS founded the Chamber Investment Forum, which is actually the Chamber of the Western Balkans, which consists of a business council consisting of the largest importers and exporters, large shipping companies, representatives of the pharmaceutical and machinery industries.
Their role, says Vesovic, is to signal when problems appear in the region, in order to react quickly and to explain to the governments of those countries from the point of view of the economy what it means to change certain administrative procedures, recognize certificates and harmonize practice in the region with European practice. A union to which all the countries of the Western Balkans aspire, Politika reports.
