The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, said that he had talked with the NBS Governor Jorgovanka Tabakovic, who told him that the level of direct foreign investments reached the level of 1.732 billion euros in the first half of the year.
– I hope we can push ourselves to reach three billion euros this year. However, this is also the year of the corona, so people do not decide to invest, he explained.
He also announced that Serbia will have an economic growth of 15% in the second quarter, which is an absolute record for Serbia in any quarter.
Vucic pointed out that Serbia had a minimal negative growth of minus 1, ie minus 0.9 percent.
“Because of that, our growth can hardly be high, and we expect to be the first in Europe this year in terms of growth with plus seven percent,” he said.
That, he points out, would bring a very significant increase in pensions.
-Even if we use the Swiss model, we will have a surprise for retirees. If I say there is reason for joy and good news they know I am not lying to them. I believe that they will be happy with what we will say in a month or two, he emphasized.
He said that there will definitely be a salary increase that will be significant.
Also, he says he wants to increase the minimum wage to be more than 300 euros.
– For the first time in the history of Serbia, the one who has the minimum would not have less than 300 euros, which will be before the end of the year. This is a significant shift in standards, because we took special care of poor people, who had 140 euros a couple of years ago and will reach 300 euros, he explained.
According to him, things are changing with great speed.
However, he criticized the fact that the ministers spent only 28% of the budget on capital investments.
– I told Prime Minister Ana Brnabic that this cannot be tolerated. So we will have 70 percent execution, and you have to have 80 percent. At the moment, we have a better result in the budget, a lower deficit by more than a billion euros. Of that billion euros, 300 million were generated with higher revenues, which we can look forward to. But we cannot be happy for 700 million euros because it shows that ministers, directors of public companies did not spend money, because they did not have prepared projects, asked for more money than they could spend, did not prepare enough projects for which we could spend money, he said.
Vucic pointed out that investments in public investments must be pushed in order to reach numbers that guarantee much more money and budgets, Novosti reports.
