Economics

Copying another country’s economic model is like shooting at a moving target, especially in the EU, where aid to smaller countries always entails political and economic control. What is special about the Balkans is that small interest groups have survived throughout history, which makes the region fertile ground for clientelism.

In the late 1990s, the scolding of the middle class had begun in the USA. Its lifestyle: too expensive, too wasteful, too costly. It used to live in cities. Now it lives 40 miles away, in the suburbs. One automobile used to suffice. Now there have to be 2, or more. The sizes of the living area, the energy consumption and the size of the properties have also multiplied – as have the debts.

The IMF delegation's mid-June visit to Serbia has briefly suppressed the country's traditional problems, bringing to the forefront an additional one, namely the reform of the public sector.  

 In light of the stagnant economy, fiscal problems are coming to the forefront. They consist of high state expenditure which is partially financed by indebtedness, but also of irrational utilization of loans taken, which are being used as a means for buying the social peace, instead for investments – for example, in infrastructure.

Due to computerization and automatization, knowledge-based capitalism creates societal wealth with less work. Two fundamental questions arise from this: if the society is producing more wealth with less work, how can it then render every individual’s income dependent of the workload delivered by that individual? And further, how the economic problem, namely that, under the given circumstances, exclusion of labor leads to the decrease of the means of payment brought in circulation (salaries) and thus to the decrease of solvent demands.