Linda van Gelder, the World Bank (WB) Regional Director for Western Balkans, has said Serbia could reach seven percent of economic growth if it implements a new programme of reforms, the news agencies have reported.

However, the WB warned that not a single country in Europe had a seven percent growth in consecutive years and that only the Baltic states and Poland recorded it occasionally.

The estimate for Serbia is based on the fact that since 2014, Belgrade managed to neutralise the budget deficit, to almost halve the unemployment rate and reduce the public debt to some 54 percent of the GDP, the WB said in a report.

Ekaterina Vostroknutova, a lead economist in the WB’s Eastern Europe and Central Asia Region, said that Serbia could double its GDP in ten years if it had an annual growth of seven percent, while if it was five percent, it would take the country 14-15 years fro the same result.

According to the WB, Serbia needs to raise public and private investments to five and 20 percent of the GDP respectively, i.e., to a total of 25 percent of the GDP, instead of current 19.4 percent.

It must be followed by increased efficiency of the investments.

The country needs to improve workforce qualification since it lacks adequate workers. Serbia should work on promoting its export, on financially helping expending companies more, improve the business environment and empower the competition.

However, the WB said that the current productivity growth of one percent per year was not enough to reach the GDP of seven percent.

The Bank warns that “Serbia’s manufacturing industry needs three times more workers to produce the same product than an EU average company requires.”

It also said that if the country reduced the state presence in the economy, especially by cutting down its part in the ownership or suspend favourable status that state companies enjoyed and lessen the obstacles to the competition, it could save at least one percent of the GDP.

The Bank added that the state aid was “excessive and wrongly distributed to unproductive state companies.”

The reduction in that aid from one to 1.5 percent, the Bank said, and its transfer into more productive businesses, like public investments, would increase the economic growth.

Also, the higher level of education needed in the private sector would increase the GDP for 1.3 percent, the WB said.