Budget anticipates 27,000 people less in public sector

BELGRADE - President of the Fiscal Council Pavle Petrovic said Monday that the Serbian government's proposal for the 2015 budget envisaged reducing the number of employees in the public sector by about five percent or about 27,000 employees.

Submitting the Fiscal Council's report on the budget for next year, Petrovic told a meeting of the Serbian parliament's Committee on Finance, State Budget and Control of Public Spending that the government had not yet prepared precise plans for dismissal of surplus workers.

Petrovic said it was apparent that the government was counting on "natural outflow," or departure of employees by retiring, adding that between 15 and 20 thousand employees had been leaving the public sector that way every year.

Petrovic said that it did not mean that the number of public sector employees would automatically be reduced to that extent, since a certain number of employees had to be replaced by new employees.

He said that the budget for 2015 foresaw important structural adjustments that implied a permanent reduction in expenditures from EUR 600 to 650 million, which was of paramount importance to the budget.

This permanent reduction of expenditures will not be fully realized next year, but it is realistic to expect it to be there in 2016 and thereafter, said the Fiscal Council president.

The most important measure for structurally reducing deficit next year is salary and pension cuts that will bring about savings of EUR 400 million, and the other measures are reducing the number of employees in the public sector and regulating the work of public enterprises, said Petrovic.

In order to achieve good and lasting saivings it is necessary that public enterprises are put...