Our economy should base its further growth on new technologies for sustainable development, primarily on energy transformation, green economy, digitalization of health and biomedical technology, said Prime Minister Ana Brnabic yesterday, at the closing of the Kopaonik Business Forum.
– I deeply believe that the opportunities before us are many times greater, even than the ones we have had so far, and that the green and biotechnological transformation will be much larger in scope than the digital transformation we are witnessing. The key area and source of growth in the near future is the combination of biotechnology and technology, the results of which we can already see from modern RNA vaccines against Covid 19 to new drugs for the most severe forms of diseases such as cancer – said Brnabc..
The report of the World Economic Forum on health and the fourth industrial revolution identifies three major trends. These are the digitalization of health care, the rapid evolution of science and medicine, and the rising cost of health care around the globe. The World Economic Forum predicts that from this year, the total amount of medical knowledge will double every 73 days and that the global biotechnology market will grow from 448 billion dollars in 2019 to 833 billion in 2027. It is predicted that the application of artificial intelligence to the health services market will reach a value of 31.3 billion dollars in 2025.
– These are huge opportunities for economic growth and further development of Serbia. Therefore, this year and next we will group our best qualities into a cap that will cover the areas of biomedicine, biotechnology, bioinformatics and biodiversity. We will have the Faculty of Pharmacy and Biology, Torlak and the Institute of Molecular Genetics grouped in one place, while the newly formed Institute for Artificial Intelligence will be on campus, so that all knowledge will generate new growth for our country – announced Brnabic..
The Prime Minister added that two days ago, the Slovenian “Delo” published an article in which it says why their NLB, which bought Komercijalna Banka, is opening a development center in Belgrade, and not in Slovenia, and that article states, among other things, that Belgrade for several years became a technology center where information technology experts from the countries of the former Yugoslavia come. On the same day, in Novi Sad, she laid the foundation stone for the building of the Biosens Institute, which with its knowledge and commitment managed to become a European center of excellence in digital agriculture, and the only such center outside the EU.
– Both of these events provide me with an answer to the central question of this year’s Kopaonik Business Forum about new sources of growth in the changed economic circumstances – said Brnabic.
Digitalization has come to life in Serbia and is gradually making our economy more competitive, the state more efficient, and making life easier for citizens. We have seen that through impeccably organized vaccination. As a result, our economy ended in 2020 with a minimal drop in GDP. The first quarter of this year indicates that we will exceed the projected growth of six percent, and April is also working well, so the growth in the second quarter will probably be better than expected.
This economic growth has been driven by the growth of the construction industry and our investments in infrastructure. More than 330 kilometers of highways and expressways are being built, worth four billion euros, and projects worth another two billion euros are planned by the end of the year.
An important segment within our GDP are services, which have become the most important part of our economy, which allows it to be more resilient in this situation, as we had during the pandemic. The tourism, transport and hospitality sectors were hit hard, and banking, information technology and professional services proved extremely resilient, Politika reports.
