There is no more time to wait for the painful structural reforms and it is a priority for the Government, Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic said at the meeting with businessmen.
“Without structural reforms, we will continue to have serious irrational expenditures in all sectors, including education, labour and social policy and public administration sectors. It is the last moment, there must be a serious cut, with all social problems that it will cause”, he said, according to Radio Antena M.
Although it will not be a popular move in the election year, Djukanovic announced that the government will deal with that in January.
Djukanovic said high interest rates were one of the long-term business barriers.
“With such high rates, we will continue to have serious limitations in achieving our development needs,” Djukanovic added.
During the three-hour meeting, businessmen mentioned a number of objections related to the business environment.
Chamber of Commerce President Velimir Mijuskovic said there was a problem that does not exist in the statistics.
“It is the fact that certain structures in our society dare to publicly comment on the business of companies and their leaders. These a priori condemnations by mostly incompetent persons for that cause a real deterioration of the business ambience and giving up investments in Montenegro by both domestic and foreign investors,” Mijuskovic said.
Most complaints of businessmen were related to laws on labour and foreigners. Some of them required a full liberalisation of dismissals for workers, with the message that every good worker will keep his/her job.
The Minister of Labour and Social Welfare, Zorica Kovacevic, believes that business community is partly responsible for the poor state at the labour market too.
“A total of 32.7% of employees work in the gray economy, and only in tourism there were 5,000 people who were not reported to the tax administration,” said Kovacevic.
The questions of businessmen were also answered by other ministers responsible for economic and social policy.
