Governing the Poor

The Serbian Government last Monday, on its second birthday, held a session which according to the official statement was not a celebration but a working session. The first birthday was not even mentioned last year, probably because Serbian Prime Minister Mirko Marjanovic had an operation on that day. This time the Prime Minister made a brief statement for the "Politika" daily. The statement included all the important things the government had promised to do over the past two years. The only novelty, understandable considering the new circumstances, was the Prime Minister's assessment that conditions had been created for Serbia's and Yugoslavia's integration into the international community. His comment that this had been accomplished "thanks to the peace-making policy of Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic" provoked at least one question: would Serbia ever have been expelled from the international community if its chief had always been that way?

Unless glorification of the head of the state is the government's main task, we ought to pay attention to Prime Minister Marjanovic's promises concerning economy, both current and global. The government's direct aim is to "maintain the stability of prices, firm course of the dinar" and globally, "by all means to support the market and export-oriented economy." The ultimate goal of the government's engagement and its main task is improvement of the standard of living.

Even a detailed review of newspaper documentation will reveal no other proclamations by the Serbian Government in the past two years. The accomplishment is as it is: it would be unfair and incorrect to deny the success of Marjanovic's government, although it received its mandate after the economic and social disaster caused by the previous government of the same head of the Serbian state. Thus, two years have passed, less bad than at the time hyper-inflation, but normal societies usually compare themselves with those better than themselves. Also, success and failure of a government is usually assessed according to how much the government did of what it had promised and was expected to do.

Prime Minister Marjanovic accidentally said: "We managed to overcome all the difficulties," for if this were true, the Serbian government would not be promising the citizens to bring them in ten years' time to the standard of living equal to that which they had at the beginning of the "peace-making policy of the head of the Serbian state." Even if such a promise comes true, the average per capita income in Serbia will be about half of what it is now in Turkey, one-quarter of what it is in Greece, Portugal and Slovenia and only one-tenth of what it is in Switzerland or the USA. Whether this government or a future one will take merit for the accomplishment will depend on whether the government will narrow the gap between its proclaimed intentions and reality. From the very beginning, Marjanovic's government has been promising stable prices, and yet the inflation has been about 120 percent in the past two years. Another important objective has been the firm rate of the dinar, and yet the German Mark is now officially worth 3.3 dinars instead of one. The government no longer produces budget deficits, but it has burdened the economy so badly that even its advisors warned last year, while it increased the quasi-deficits (by dictating prices and not covering the loss of the public sector of the economy) that they could not even be added up any more.

What can one say about the Government's support to the "market and export-oriented economy" after the Serbian Government had decided to cancel the export permits which had been legally issued by the Federal Government and to proclaim itself in charge. This move was not an economic one but there were a number of such moves in the economic policy also. The launched image of the government of successful directors and of national unity would be true only if the story of their success was confirmed by the open market economy or, which is also possible, if the people decided they wanted to live worse than they could.