Soskic: I Disagree About Serbia’s Public Debt Not Being Alarmingly High

Dejan Soskic, an economist, a professor at the Faculty of Economics and a former governor of the National Bank of Serbia, said today that he disagreed with the assessment of representatives of the authorities that “the public debt of Serbia is not alarmingly high”, especially in the conditions of the further growth of interest rates, that is, the price of loans in the international market.

– For a country with unfinished reforms, with an inefficient public sector in which potential losses which are ultimately paid by the state (the taxpayers) are still often being hidden and with an insufficiently competitive economy like the Serbian economy, the existing debt is already high – Soskic said for the Nezavisnost.org portal.

He reminded that, according to international indicators of corruption perception, Serbia was 96th, far below Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, and emphasized that Serbia had been the only European country on the black list of the FATF (the international organization for the prevention of money laundering and the financing of terrorism).

– When it comes to “money laundering”, our country still has a bad position according to the international indicators which monitor that field (Basel AML Index), and it is known that “laundered money”, in its final phase, often enters the real estate market and thereby raises the real estate prices. It would be important to examine whether a connection could be found in our country between the real estate prices and money laundering – Soskic said.

The economist reminded that, in the past years, the public debt of the country had grown over EUR 8 billion, that is, from EUR 22.5 billion in 2019 to EUR 30.8 billion in the third quarter of 2022. According to Soskic, “regarding the boasting of the finance minister about the state helping the economy and the citizens with nearly EUR 9 billion in the past three years”, that means that the money has mostly come from loans and those are foreign loans “which we will have to repay as citizens and taxpayers”.

Ekonomski fakultet Beograd

Faculty of Economics

FATF

Dejan Šoškić

public debt

corruption

money laundering