Tag: Serbia

The two organisations will hold the forum on Monday, December 3 at 12.30pm in the small hall of the National Parliament.

Participants in this year’s forum will examine transparency in the budgeting process and control of budget execution.

Following an introductory debate, which will focus on the main budget policies and challenges that Serbia is likely to face in 2013, the Citizens Budget of the Republic of Serbia will be presented at working tables. Forum participants will then take part in a second debate that will focus on possibilities for greater control of the budget’s execution by the Serbian Parliament Finance Committee.

Senior officials from the Finance Ministry, Fiscal Council and National Parliament will take part in the debates, as well as experts from the community.

This annual event, now in its fourth year, is traditionally the final debate on budget priorities and models for improving the budgeting process.

Simultaneous translation from Serbian to English will be provided by the organisers.

For more information please contact Ms. Lada Vučenović at 060 3 1985 21 or [email protected].

On Saturday, November 24, over 200 residents of the municipality of Raška filled in questionnaires at a street event aimed at informing the people better about the budgeting process, principles of good governance and including the local community in the process of defining budget priorities.

This was the first time people were given an opportunity to declare themselves regarding municipal priorities in the field of capital investments. The municipality offered six projects and the people were asked to select the three that they see as most important.

Following the street event a special booth was placed at the municipal Assistance Centre where people will have a chance to fill in questionnaires until the adoption of the budget and thus give additional recommendations to the government regarding what needs to be done first in the course of next year.

Organised further under this program in the municipality of Raska will be a Local Budget Forum at which the results of the poll will be presented along with the 2013 municipal budget.

The event is a part of the Participatory Budgeting Project and a continuation of the “I Want To Because I Live Here” campaign that BIRN is carrying out with the support of the EU Progres Program of assistance to municipalities in Southwest and Southeast Serbia.

The project of implementing the practice of participatory budgeting at the local level through the European Partnership Programme with EU PROGRES municipalities in 25 municipalities in the south and southwest Serbia is supported by the European Union, the Swiss and the Serbian government.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN Serbia, in cooperation with the National Alliance for Local Economy Development, NALED, presented the results as part of BIRN’s project “Policy-based Accountability Tool for Monitoring Government Performance”.

The project aims to determine the legislation and other measures adopted by the government and their influence in practice and on citizens’ lives in five key areas: public finances, economy, anti-corruption, health and education.

The report, “The First One Hundred Days of Government”, says most success was achieved in the reform of public revenues and spending with the abolition of 138 taxes.

However, participants at the conference in Belgrade said the government had not done enough.

Ernst Bode, board member of NALED, said many problems still hindered businesses in Serbia, adding that the government still interfered in all aspects of the economy.

“Complicated and unclear procedures are still a huge problem. Laws and bylaws are either outdated, completely unnecessary, unenforceable or unclear – and sometimes implementation requires enormous efforts but gives very little results,” Bode said.

Nemanja Nenadic, programme director for the watchdog organisation Transparency Serbia, said the government had the right intention as it worked to fight corruption in the field of public procurement.

But he warned that corruption in the biggest procurements still went unpunished. “Unfortunately we deal with peanuts,” he said.

He added that the fight against corruption should not be left to individual ministers but was a task for the government as a whole.

Sasa Randjelovic, assistant at the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade, said that during and after the elections little attention was devoted to the educational system and all that has been done in the past few months has been in the area of fiscal consolidation.

He added that implementation of compulsory secondary education should be considered, while in higher education the quality of interaction with students should be improved and students should be sent abroad for specialization.

Although the government has undertaken various measures in the field of fiscal consolidation, experts at the conference agreed that without root and branch structural reform there will not be substantial impact, or much improvement in living conditions in Serbia.

The project is designed to give Serbia’s citizens access to consultative processes on spending priorities. 
At a meeting held on 24th, 25th and 26th of August in Kraljevo, BIRN Serbia gathered representatives of the Budgeting Departments of the local authorities who exchanged experiences in the budgeting process.

The main topic was improving the budgeting processes by increasing the public participation.
The basis for the discussion on how to introduce PB practices in the 2013 budget was the Analysis of existing local budget trends,  a report prepared by BIRN associates – experts in the field of finances and economy.


The meeting also provided participants with information on concepts and goals of participatory budgeting, role of local self-governance in it, timeline, preconditions and mechanisms of public participation, relevant stakeholders and necessary resources.


The meeting in Kraljevo  will be followed by many other activities within the project Participatory Budgeting that will last until February 2013

 

The survey was carried out by BIRN Serbia over the last two months on behalf of Media Coalition, an umbrella organisation representing five major media associations in Serbia.

“The purpose of the report is to map out trends in the field of financing local media and to draw attention to this issue which lays in the foundation of the media freedom,” said Dragana Zarkovic Obradovic, the director of BIRN Serbia.

Following the presentation of the report in Nis and Belgrade there is a series of advocacy activities planned to promote its recommendations.

The report was based on the analysis of the budgets of 33 Serbian municipalities that have media activity with regional reach. The survey sample did not include Belgrade and Kosovo.

It showed that almost 8,5 million euros are spent annually on financing local media, but most of that amount, more than 70%, is spent for the work of 26 public broadcasters, while the remaining 125 privately owned media share the rest.

It shows imbalance in the media market, which affects fair competition and, as a final result, negatively influences editorial policies.

BIRN has identified four basic models of financing local media: the dominating models involve giving subsidies to public services and  directly contracting media for services of covering the work of the local government.

At the same time, only 6 out of 33 municipalities are supporting media through transparent public processes, spending in that way less than 10% of the total amount for the local media.

Media Coalition will draw a set of recommendations based on the report, which will be broadly circulated and also presented to the Government.

Vukasin Obradovic, president of the Independent journalists associations, praised the report which has provided the Coalition with solid data to support their calls for the more transparent and fair distribution of financial resources to the overcrowded Serbian media market.

According to Serbian laws local authorities have to provide information of local relevance and ensure it is delivered in Serbian and the languages of the ethnic minorities used on the territory of the respective municipality.

As a result each town and municipality plans within its budget the funds for local media.

After the democratic changes of 2000, the dual media system, involving a parallel existence of public service broadcasters and commercial media, which was enshrined by the Broadcasting Law (2003), involved a fundamental transformation of the state broadcaster RTS at state level, but also the privatization of media founded by local authorities.

The privatization process, however, was stopped in 2007 and a number of privatizations was cancelled due to poorly prepared and executed tender procedures.

Such a situation paved the way for the discretion right of local authorities in the financing and control of local media which they finance directly and indirectly, as well as for the indirect influence on editorial policies.

The analysis of the survey’s results can be downloaded in English and Serbian.