BIRN Serbia Holds Fifth National Budget Forum

BIRN Serbia and Pro Concept held their fifth national budget forum at the National Assembly in Belgrade on 27 November, where panelists and participants offered their opinions and debated the proposed 2014 budget and the projected outcomes of the Serbian administration’s budgetary policy.

The panelists were finance minister Lazar Krstic, Pavle Petrovic, president of the Fiscal Council of Serbia, and Mihajlo Babin, assistant at Belgrade University’s faculty of economics, finance and administration.

The budget for next year is realistic and represents the first step towards the normalisation of fiscal policy because it does not make deeper cuts than necessary, said finance minister Krstic.

The minister said that a third of the budget will go to public sector employees, who number more than 740,000. He added that the government will propose a review of public administration employment.

Krstic also announced that there will be a reform of pay scales in the public sector, partly because of the budget deficit.

Responding to a suggestion from the Fiscal Council that reforms should be more aggressive when it comes to pensions, Krstic said that it was not politically possible.

Pavle Petrovic pointed to the need for fiscal consolidation, because without it, crisis is certain, he warned. He added that its aim was not to raise economic growth, but to create the conditions in which growth is possible.

”Necessary measures through which the state can affect economic growth include changes in the labour law, which have been announced but have still not been implemented, the shortening of procedures for construction permits, resolving the fate of companies in restructuring, and reforming public enterprises,” said Petrovic.

He said in 2014 alone, 560 million euro will be spent on unsuccessful public companies such as Srbijagas, Galenika, Serbian Railways, and partly on banks.

According to Petrovic, the biggest problem is Srbijagas with debts of over a billion euro, of which 800 million are owed to banks.

He stressed that it was import ant that from the middle of the next year Srbijagas, as a company which should operate with a profit, does not receive any money from the budget and begins paying off some of its debts by itself.

”Next year Srbijagas will cost 150 million euro, which is more than what is given to Serbian Railways, the company with the largest subsidies so far and more than overall government spending on science. Not only that, but it is more than the planned savings of 100 million euro by introducing a solidarity tax on salaries in the public sector,” said Petrovic.

Mihajlo Babin meanwhile pointed to the problem of ineffective financing of the public sector, as well as the problem of using up loans, with $3 billion of loan funds currently untouched.

”The key question is what the loans are used for, whether for structural reforms or not. Loans are not supposed to be taken up for covering liquidity, but to increase development. In the future, we should solve the problem of how to give up on loans that we do not need. It is better to pay the penalty now , rather than  interest later on, or to start efficiently implementing them in certain sectors,” said Babin.

The fifth national budget forum brought together more than 90 representatives of ministries, local government and civil society.

BIRN Serbia gives investigative reporting master class

BIRN Serbia’s Aleksandar Djordjevic and Slobodan Georgiev took part in a special programme at Belgrade’s political science faculty focused on investigative reporting for students of journalism, and presenting BIRN’s experience in this area.

In the one-hour class, Georgiev and Djordjevic explained main challenges and principles of investigative journalism to the 20 students who attended.

Georgiev spoke about the starting points of every investigation and final goals of a story.

“Investigative journalism lies in every good story and it is not about sending someone to prison, it is about a good journalistic job,” he said.

Djordjevic spoke about several examples that illustrate how these principles work in practice by guiding participants through one investigative process. He presented possible online and offline sources and demonstrated techniques for checking information.

BIRN Serbia launches research on media financing

BIRN Serbia has begun a new project to research current practices in media financing, which will result in the development of best-practice recommendations as well as proposals for the monitoring and evaluation of future practice in the area.

The overall aim of the project is to protect the public interest through the provision of independent and quality media production and more transparent public spending.

According to government-adopted Media Strategy and the new Draft Law on Public Information and Media, public funds should be allocated to the media outlets only through open-call procedures. Currently, the majority of funds for media are allocated directly, while a smaller portion are allocated based on open calls for projects and through tenders.

The project strategy is intended to develop a non-discriminatory, consistent and transparent system of financing media production in order to enable citizens to exercise their right to complete, timely and objective information.

Within the project, BIRN will analyse the existing practice of financing, develop proposals for future practice and organise a series of round table discussions in five cities.

The project research will start by December 2013 and will last until October 2014.

This research is part of BIRN’s ‘Enhancing media independence through development of sustainable and competitive financing model’ project, conducted under the auspices of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Belgrade.

BIRN Serbia holds debate on EU’s 2013 progress report

BIRN Serbia held a debate on Tuesday about whether the government has been successful and efficient in implementing reforms in the context of European Commission’s recently-published 2013 report on Serbia’s progress.

The debate focused on four key areas – the economy, health, education and the fight against corruption – in which BIRN Serbia has been monitoring government policies for the past year and a half.

The speakers were Dragana Zarkovic-Obradovic, director of BIRN Serbia, Jasminka Cekic Markovic, director of the Centre for Education Policies, Predrag Stojicic, director of Serbia on the Move, Kori Udovicki, director of the Centre for Advanced Economic studies and Nemanja Nenadic, programme director for the watchdog organisation Transparency.

More than 40 media, NGO and public administration representatives took part in the conference.

Dragana Zarkovic-Obradovic said that BIRN’s latest research showed that, even though European Commission report was generally considered “historically positive”, the real effects of the government’s reforms only range from semi-successes to failures.

Kori Udovicki stressed that the government’s economic promises were populist and that it is necessary to follow priorities and plan strategically in order to increase productivity.

She said that tightening up financial discipline and the rationalisation of the public sector were the main mechanisms for the recovery of Serbian economy.

Nemanja Nenadic said he believes that the EC report corresponded to real reforms in Serbia, but that it did not cover all the important issues – problems that repeat themselves from year to year, which Serbia has not done enough to solve.

He added that Serbia is entering another pre-election campaign period even though issues that came up during the previous election still haven’t been solved.

All participants in the debate agreed that the EC’s ratings are better than in previous years, but noted that Brussels is never too severe with the authorities.

The debate was part of the BIRN Serbia ‘Accountability Tools for Monitoring Government Performance’ project, which was conducted under the auspices of the British Embassy in Belgrade.

BIRN Serbia publishes ministries’ 2012 discretionary expenditures

BIRN Serbia has published a database of the discretionary expenditures of the country’s ministries for 2012 on its portal Javno.rs.

The database contains information on how the ministries spent public funds on budget lines 423 and 424, contracted services and specialised services for 2010, 2011 and 2012.

The Serbian government has announced savings in the area of goods and services and discretion rights as one of its planned measures for economic recovery. This measure is intended to deliver savings up to four billion dinars for the state budget.

BIRN’s research has shown that the ministries have increased discretionary expenses during the past three years and paid 53.6 billion dinars in total for various contractual and specialised services.

In 2010, ministries spent 2.6 billion dinars on specialised services and11.6 billion dinars on contracted services.

According to data for 2011, the costs of specialised services were reduced and total expenditures of ministries on these were 1.5 billion dinars, while the costs of contracted services increased by five billion dinars compared to the previous year.

The data that BIRN collected for 2012 showed an opposite trend in the spending of public money on these two budget lines. The ministries spent much more money to pay for specialised services, nearly 19 billion dinars, while on contracted services, they spent only 2.1 billion.

All the information contained in this database was based on requests for access to information of public importance and it took up to six months to collect all the answers and two more months to make easily accessible and searchable.

Javno.rs is an open and fully searchable database containing thousands of documents on public expenditure. The databases that have been created will be supplemented every year while new ones will be developed, covering fields of interest that we assess as murky areas of public expenditure or as potential generators of corruption in Serbia.

For which specific services and with which individuals and legal entities ministries closed contracts worth up to tens of millions of deinars, see the website http://javno.skockajtebudzet.rs/index.php.

The idea for Javno came from BIRN but our many partners helped to implement it, from the British Embassy in Belgrade to IREX.

BIRN Serbia Continues Post-Election Monitoring

For the past year and a half, BIRN Serbia has been developing mechanisms for qualitative monitoring of government’s policies, mapping trends and reforms in the four areas which citizens singled out as the most important to their personal and social well-being – the economy, the fight against corruption, health and education. Thanks to the continuation of the project ‘Accountability Tools for Monitoring Government Performance’, supported by the British Embassy in Belgrade, BIRN will carry on its watchdog role for another six months.

The long term goal is to positively influence the creation and implementation of public policies in the four designated fields, through the creation of public demand and the engagement of civil society organisations, experts and public administrations, driven by the monitoring results.

Based on the research conducted during the electoral campaign, BIRN came up with a follow-up project, and since September 2012 has set up unique post-election watchdog mechanism, focused on the fulfilment of electoral promises made by politicians.

This mechanism also contributes to tracking general progress on reforms and enabling debate on policy choices made by the government in the four targeted fields. A monitoring matrix, containing several qualitative indicators, will be soon published online and, along with legislative and budgetary tracking and shadow reporting, presents an important tool for voters to make politicians accountable.

The implementation of this project will provide all interested parties with critical and unbiased insights into the progress of reforms and the quality of public policies in the four designated fields, empowering their meaningful participation in public debate. It will also help intensify public discussion and engage all relevant stakeholders over potentially controversial moves by the government. 

BIRN Serbia Wins Regional Journalism Competition

The South East European Media Observatory, a regional partnership of civil society organisations aimed at enhancing media freedom and influencing reforms, has chosen BIRN Serbia to produce a series of investigative articles related to ‘soft censorship’ in the Serbian media sector.

BIRN Serbia will produce stories which tackle the abuse of public money to exert political influence on the media. The stories will focus on the allocation of public funds in the Serbian media sector as a tool to control media outlets.

The stories will show how the misuse of state funds consequently leads to clientelism and soft censorship and is also a potential source of corruption and legal violations. The core story will be related to the situation in the Serbian media sector, while a regional perspective will be provided through an investigation in Croatia, showing a similar trend.

In the light of the Serbia’s new EU integration developments, BIRN Serbia’s work on the issue is anticipated to be a step towards advocating changes to current poor media practices and the adoption of new, European standards in the sector.

The BIRN Serbia proposal was one of six investigative journalism initiatives to receive support from the South East European Media Observatory grant scheme. The independent jury decided to award one project from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia, and two proposals from Macedonia.

The project will last until December 2013, and it is expected that all the stories will be published both on project web site and BIRN’s own sites (regionally on BalkanInsight.com and locally on Skockajtebudzet.rs).

BIRN Assesses Serbian Government’s First Year

BIRN Serbia has published a report about the government’s progress in fulfilling election promises in four key areas – economy, health, education and the fight against corruption. 

For the past year, BIRN Serbia has been monitoring government policies in the four areas which citizens singled out as the most important to their personal and social well-being.

The monitoring results showed that the government had made limited progress in fulfilling election promises made and that implementation was even slower dynamics politicians planned.

According to BIRN’s report, the least progress was made in the field of education. The most important legislative activity was related to the adoption of the Education Development Strategy in Serbia to 2020, although no action plan was adopted for its implementation.

In the health area, the government should seriously work on establishing  anti-corruption measures, transparency in public procurement, the availability of health protection by clearly defining the status of private practices, and infrastructure improvement.

In this field, campaign promises were partly fulfilled by expanding the number of patients who are eligible for health insurance at the expense of the state and by implementing some measures of population policy. The long-awaited law on the protection of patients’ rights was also adopted.

The Anti-Corruption Strategy is the most important document which was adopted by the government and parliament in the field of the fight against graft, and contains key recommendations for the prevention of corruption and the strengthening of independent control institutions.

Even though the privatisation audit showed government’s determination to fight corruption, work should continue to strengthen institutional mechanisms in order to minimise corruption, which is seen as systemic.

In the economic field, which is the top priority for the public, there was very little progress, even though most of the legislative initiatives in the past year were launched in this area. The government was unable to find an adequate solution to the economic crisis, unemployment is still high and it is necessary to consolidate public finances in order to reduce the budget deficit and public debt.

The report is part of the BIRN Serbia ‘Monitoring Policies of the Government of Serbia’ project, which was conducted under the auspices of the British Embassy in Belgrade.

More information is available at http://www.skockajtebudzet.rs/rs/clanak/godinu-dana-vlade-ne-ispunjenost-obecanja

Annual meeting of BIRN Assembly and Steering Board

BIRN brought together its Steering Board and Assembly members for their annual meeting in Belgrade from July 9-12.

The meeting takes place each year in the Serbian capital to enable Board and Assembly members to discuss BIRN’s ongoing activities and its plans for strategy development.

During the three-day meeting, a new BIRN statute that was presented last year at the Board meeting and an audit of BIRN HUB was endorsed.

Ana Petruseva, one of the founders of the BIRN regional network and BIRN Macedonia, said: “This helps us get clear picture how to proceed with new and ongoing BIRN activities.”

Local BIRN directors presented also all their country activities and strategic and operational issues to the members of the Assembly.

The possibility of opening a BIRN office in Albania was also discussed.

BIRN Steering Board and Assembly Meets in Belgrade

BIRN is holding its annual Steering Board and Assembly meeting from July 9-12 in Belgrade.

The meeting is organised to discuss strategic and operational issues facing BIRN, ongoing programmes and plans for the future. 

The Steering Board is composed of BIRN country directors. Each board member will make a presentation about country specifics and fundraising activities.

The Assembly brings together Tim Judah, author and Balkans correspondent for The Economist, Wolfgang Petritsch, Austria’s permanent representative to the OECD, Steve Crawshaw, international advocacy director at Amnesty International, Stefan Lehne, former Austrian diplomat and visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, and Per Bymon, secretary-general of Swedish Radio and Television’s humanitarian foundation, Radiohjälpen.