Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said last night that the National Bank of Serbia had done analyzes for the Information and Communication Technologies sector by the end of October, and that the value of exports by the tenth month of 2021 was as much as 1.47 billion euros.
In the show “Cirilica” on Happy TV, she explained that this is practically the value of exporting our minds and that it means that our innovators have created something that has been exported to the world in such a value.
“Today, the IT sector is the largest net export branch, surpassing agriculture in the amount of exports. The information and communication sector has a larger share in GDP than, say, construction, and everyone knows how much is being built in Serbia,” said the Prime Minister.
She explained that from 2008 to 2021, exports and the surplus in the field of information technology have changed significantly.
“Exports in 2008 were 178 million euros, and we did not have a surplus, we already had a deficit – we imported more intelligence than we exported. By the end of this year, the amount of our exports will be close to two billion euros, and our surplus in the first 10 months is almost a billion and a half euros. To be completely clear, that is the money that goes to our country,” the Prime Minister pointed out.
She emphasized that the salaries in this sector are certainly much higher than the national average, but similarly, the contributions to those salaries that are returned to the budget are much higher.
According to her, because of that, among other things, Serbia today has more money for salaries of medical workers and funds for the construction of highways, new hospitals and schools.
“When we created the Ministerial Council for IT in 2016, then 19,000 people were employed in the programming sector alone. Our estimate was that at that time there were another 15,000 people who could immediately get a job in this industry. Then they attacked us that they were empty stories and political promises, and today we have 43,500 employees and in just five years we have more than doubled that number,” said Brnabić, Politika reports.
