The implementation of the current arrangement is going well, the director of the Belgrade office of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Belgrade, Yulia Ustyugova, said at the presentation of NALED’s research on the gray economy, and confirmed that the new mission will visit Serbia in a few weeks.
During her address, Ustyugova said that so far everything that was agreed has been fulfilled when it comes to this phase of implementing the arrangement.
When it comes to projections, the IMF calculates that the Serbian economy will record growth of around two percent this year, as well as that next year GDP growth should accelerate to around three percent, and then to 4.5 percent. in order to maintain a growth rate of around four percent per year in the medium term, Ustyugova said.
“Inflation, however, is a key issue not only for Serbia, but also for the whole of Europe. We see that inflation has started to decline in Serbia, partly because of the high base for comparison in the last year, partly because of the tightening of monetary policy. We expect that at the end of this year, inflation will be around eight percent, and that it will slow down to four percent by the end of next year,” Ustyugova said.
She emphasized that within a year of the approval of the stand-by arrangement, there was a drastic improvement when it comes to the movement of the level of the current account deficit.
“We projected that the deficit would be around 8-9 percent of GDP, but it is currently at 2.5 percent,” Ustyugova said, adding that the state’s income level was also a positive surprise, despite the somewhat smaller contribution of income from of VAT.
Cautious optimism
The President of the Executive Board of Unicredit Bank, Nikola Vuletić, presented the forecasts of the systemic domestic bank, which largely coincide with the forecasts of the IMF.
“We think that, when it comes to GDP growth, we will end this year at about two percent, and if we take into account that the growth in the EU will amount to about 0.5 percent and that, according to our estimates, in Germany, the economic growth will be negative at the level of -0.3 percent, I think this is a good result for our economy,” Vuletić said.
Unicredit, by the way, calculates slightly lower medium-term growth for our country than the IMF, at three percent. At NALED’s conference “Grey Economy in Serbia – Trends and Prospects”, Vuletić pointed out that the domestic banking sector is well capitalized and liquid.
Sign up for business updates & specials.
