Debt-to-GDP ratio

The Ministry of Finance announced this late last week.

According to the statement, the increase of the credit rating of the Republic of Serbia by "Fitch Ratings" reflects the improvement of public finances, supported by the fiscal outcome.

BELGRADE - The Serbian government on Wednesday adopted the 2018 budget bill, which envisions revenues of 1,178 bln dinars and expenditures of 1,207 bln dinars.

Bulgaria and Romania can join the Eurozone once they have met all membership criteria, the managing director of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the Eurozone's rescue fund, said. "It is an ongoing process [...] Other countries should join but they need to meet the criteria," Klaus Regling said in response to a SeeNews question during a press briefing in Luxembourg last week.

Developing countries are increasingly attracting debt capital on the domestic market. The sovereign debt of developing countries rose more than double from USD 5.2 trillion in 2007 to USD 11.7 trillion by the end of 2016, according to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), reported the Financial Times, quoted by BGNES.

The government foresees increasing the minimum wage from BGN 460 to BGN 510 as of January 1, 2018, to BGN 560 as of January 1, 2019 and to BGN 610 as of January 1, 2020. This is part of the mid-term budget forecast for 2018-2020, the Finance Ministry said.

In November 2012, at the insistence of the IMF, the Eurogroup committed in fairly explicit terms to provide debt relief to ensure that Greece's debt-to-GDP ratio would be substantially lower than 110 percent by 2022. In successive steps, these commitments were taken back and the metric to assess debt sustainability was changed.

KOPAONIK - Serbia's public debt-to-GDP ratio is on a downward trajectory and we are on the verge of reducing it to below 70 pct, Finance Minister Dusan Vujovic said Tuesday.

"We thought we would never get below 70 pct, but now... our projection is that will be at the Maastricht level of 60 pct by 2020," Vujovic said at the Kopaonik Business Forum.

BELGRADE - The Serbian government has practically achieved, or even exceeded, the 2015-2017 fiscal consolidation targets, the Fiscal Council said in document prepared for the Kopaonik Business Forum, to ceremonially open late Monday.

State debt in the entire European Union and the Euro zone has decreased as a percentage of GDP in the third quarter of 2016, showed Eurostat data.

The level of state debt in Bulgaria also marked a drop, compared to the second quarter, in spite of the fact that debt increased on an annual basis (compared to the third quarter of 2015).

The Croatian National Bank, HNB, confirmed to BIRN on Tuesday that it is advocating that the country introduce the euro as its currency. The HNB is convinced that entering the Eurozone would eventually be "a cheaper and simpler solution" than continuing with the Croatian kuna and managing its exchange rate.