Serbian Fiscal Council

Serbia's budget proposal for 2019 envisages a big increase in spending of about 40 per cent for the army and 13.5 per cent for the police.

In 2019, the government plans to allocate the Interior Ministry about 720 million euros, while the Defence Ministry will get about 792 million euros.

Serbia's Prime Minister and the Serbian Fiscal Council expressed concern after the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter of a point for the first time in almost a decade. Around 30 per cent of Serbian public debt is in dollars.

The Serbian Fiscal Council, an independent state expert body, said on Friday that it was too early for Vucic's government to abandon the austerity measures that contribute most to reducing the budget deficit.

As parliament started talking about the draft budget on Monday, Pavle Petrovic from the Serbian Fiscal Council, an independent state body charged with assessing monetary policy, said it envisages that the number of people working in publicly-owned companies and the state administration will be reduced by five per cent, or around 27,000 people.

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