Serbia may postpone holding loan talks with the International Monetary Fund along with a budget revision as it tries to assess if the economy contracts or stagnates after recent floods.
Talks with the IMF may be held after the lender’s mission completes Article IV consultations with authorities “sometime in the fall,” Finance Minister Lazar Krstic told an economic conference in Belgrade. The economy, he said, will either stagnate or shrink 0.5 percent this year. An annual contraction would make it the third since 2009. He didn’t give more precise timing on when a potential deal could be reached reports Bloomberg. Serbia’s Premier Aleksandar Vucic, whose government was sworn in on April 27, has delayed talks with the IMF twice in recent weeks, initially promising a deal with the Washington-based lender in June and then in July. The country is also struggling to deal with floods last month that killed at least 19 people in the largest former Yugoslav republic. The government expects to tally up the damage by end-July to start working on new fiscal targets for this year, Krstic said.
“We will have an IMF mission related to Article IV consultations” which may lead to talks on a three-year stand-by loan by the end of this year, he said.
Source Balkans
