In the last five years, Serbia has been richer in more than 53,000 businesses and entrepreneurial businesses and last year ended with 390,767 active first-rate entities, making it the 17th country in Europe, a startup entrepreneurship conference “Start Legally 2020” said.
Speaking at the conference, Prime Minister Ana Brnabic praised the success and told citizens that the Serbian government is lending a hand to all entrepreneurs with more than 10 state incentive programs. 780 companies and stores were opened with 850 employees.
As part of that program, she said, the reform of inspection oversight began, which, she said, was the beginning of the fight against the gray economy and support for small and medium-sized enterprises and businesses.
The Prime Minister recalls that young people who have graduated from the school in the last year, as well as those who have been on the National Employment Service’s records for more than six months, are motivated to start their own businesses by being exempt from taxes and contributions for the first 12 months. Brnabic announced that the measure would be extended to all innovation companies and activities from March 1 this year, not to 12 months of tax exemption and contribution, but to three years.
“We want to support young people and innovation, because that is the direction in which we want our economy to develop and be driven by innovation so that we can have faster economic growth and better wages”, said Brnabic.
She also announced that from February the portal entrepreneurship.gov.rs will be established, where all kinds of incentives that the state provides to start-ups in business will be highlighted in one place. She praised the launch of the new Entrepreneurship Champions 2020 Local Self-Government Competition, which started today and whose results will be declared at the end of the year as the most entrepreneurial local government, organized by the National Alliance for Local Economic Development (NALED) and the Republican Secretariat for Public Policy, and under the auspices of the Government and with the support of German Development Cooperation.
Brnabic said local representatives should be more involved in incentives for starting a business. NALED board member Stanka Pejanovic says that a new impetus will be given to entrepreneurship in Serbia in 2020 and that all sections of society will be encouraged through competition, to think entrepreneurially.
“In the last five years in Serbia the number of companies and entrepreneurial activities has increased by more than 53,000 or 16 percent and last year we ended up with 390,767 registered companies. If we were part of the EU, we would be the 17th country in terms of the number of active companies and stores”, Pejanovic points out.
According to her, the rate of “birth” of business, as a share of start-ups in the total number of economic entities, reaches almost 12 percent, and that is where Serbia is, at the European top.
“After the global economic crisis, when we recorded more shut downs than started businesses for several years, the picture is completely different now. For example, today we have twice as many open than closed companies a year”, Pejanovic said for Dnevnik.
