The Second Roundtable with the Government of Serbia
„Serbia in 2009 - growth, stagnation or recession"
The second roundtable with the Government of Serbia in cooperation with CIPE named „Serbia in 2009 - growth, stagnation or recession?" was held in Belgrade, in the Hyatt hotel, on March 16th, 2009
Roundtable gathered around 130 participants: policy activists, representatives from the business community, academia, NGO representatives, representatives of Embassies, media, etc.
The meeting was opened by Mr. Slobodan Vučićević, the President of the Serbian Association of Managers. Moderator was Jelena Galic, Member of the SAM Management Board and Director of Management Consulting, Deloitte in Belgrade.
Roundtable started with an introductory speech given by Professor Boško Živković, Professor at the Belgrade University, Faculty of Economics. Mr. Živkovic introductory speech was directed on what can or what should be done in order to improve Serbia's economic perspectives and business attractiveness in the light of current global financial and economic crises (since Serbia's economy is indirectly influenced by the global shortage of the liquidity and bad business perspectives). He raised lot of questions about responsibility of business community, as well as the Government, in order to improve Serbia internal and external liquidity position, economic development sustainability and business perspectives (especially in terms of private business development).
Next speech was given by Mr. Mlađan Dinkić, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy and Regional Development. He presented the Government strategy and policy in this area, as well as urgent set of measures that Government planned to adopt soon. He stressed that this type of events and discussion between policy makers and business representatives were very important in developing and implementing right Government actions and that presently the most important thing is to have consensus about further reform steps. After him, Mr. Božidar Đelić, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Science, provided his views about necessity of coordinated policy action with the aim of diminishing the influence of global crises and increased attractiveness of business environment in order to attract further investment (domestic or foreign one).
After these introductory speeches, the dialogue was opened and a number of issues were raised by members of SAM.
The Roundtable had broad media coverage and attracted great attention due to the fact that the economic situation is threatened to be worsen in the upcoming period and that Government had adopted recently first set of measures for diminishing the negative effects of the global crises on domestic production and economy.