Rations, coupons...

The federal government is keeping its word: The Minister of the Economy said on Thursday, through the state news agency, that "the people should be prepared for everything". In this case, "prepared for everything" refers to the mechanisms of an administrative economy, to supplying the economy and the population with the help of ration coupons and points. Judging by the cob web that is slowly spreading on the closed doors of the "Dafiment bank", the authorities despise the people, with good reason, and there is absolutely no cause for fear of possible social unrest because of the introduction of the so called flour-oil-sugar economy. Even pensioners who, if it is not in bad taste to say so, do not have much to lose as regards their present living standard since the state has emptied the pension funds, and even less as far as a career is concerned, are queueing up again in Belgrade these days: they obediently wait for hours to put themselves on a list for getting a few kilograms or liters of flour, oil or sugar at government-fixed prices.

The government has been warned that by introducing an anti-market and distributive economy it is giving arguments, without any reason, to the International Monetary Fund and the World bank to exclude Yugoslavia from these institutions this June /Oskar Kovac, professor of the Faculty of Economics/; that the economy will not be able to take a new domestic blow by the state, and that the government's main task is to lower hyper-inflation /Nebojsa Savic, the Economic Institute's scientific advisor/; that the administration is neither prepared nor able to fully manage the economy so as to achieve a balance of trade /Ljubomir Madzar, professor at the Economics Faculty/; that the sanctions are being used as an excuse for introducing a distributive economy, while, in fact, what we have here are belated reactions, an exhausted policy and the lack of a vision of how to get out of the present situation /Tomislav Popovic, director of the Institute for economic studies/. To all this, true in the lobbies, federal prime minister Kontic reacted angrily because he did not hear what he wanted to, that is, because theoreticians are being "wise guys".

At the beginning of that gathering, Federal Prime Minister Radoje Kontic presented the account balances for almost two thirds of the Yugoslav economy, but much more realistic than those with he came out with some twenty days before. As an illustration, Kontic now says that domestic oil could satisfy half of the consumption, but if the hitherto production is halved. Before this, he did not mention the halved production, that is, he spoke in the same manner as the Slobodan Milosevic-Radoman Bozovic (former Serbian Prime Minister) team, which revealed before TV cameras last autumn, inexhaustible and rich oil fields in Turija Polje /even though experts told them, away from TV cameras, that they don't even have pipes for new oil wells/.

It should be expected that in his next public appearance Kontic explains how the hitherto oil consumption is to be halved. The fact is that the federal government signs the requests of the Serbian authorities. Therefore, one should soon expect that it makes official a moratorium /read: postponement for an indefinite period of time/ on the privatization of the economy. Namely, in an unofficial circle of people, the Serbian Prime Minister criticized privatization very sharply as the source of irrationality and machinations, and anyone who is familiar even a part with the mechanism according to which the Serbian authorities function, knows that the Prime Minister would not be able to say a word about this without previous instructions.

At the same time, experts warn that without determining what is old scrap and what stands a chance of brining in profit, there can be no progress in resolving the crisis. The fact that the necessary privatization of the economy is confined to domestic resources, and very poor ones at that, is not a matter of the concept but rather of the state policy that has led to the war, to sanctions, and the outpour of capital - to an unheard-of isolation from knowledge and money. The authorities have taken another road. They will decide that the Deutsche mark is worth about a hundred thousand dinars when street dealers will be paying at least 50 percent more; daily inflation is five percent and even serious business people change their prices every day at noon. It is certain that the projection of the central bank's policy and the amount of money the central bank issues do not correspond: the amount of money is doubled every month - and that is, unlike the official reports, the true measure of the monthly inflation. This level, approximately 300 percent a month, is also confirmed by the growth of the hard currency exchange rates on the black market.

Experts of the Belgrade-based Institute for economic studies and their associates have made a practically desperate attempt to prevent such a course of developments by formulating a strategy for dealing with the social and economic crisis. The authors of the project took as a point of departure optimistic /political/ prejudices: an end to the war in Bosnia by the end of this month and the launching of talks with international monetary institutions in the second half of the year, with the first financial assistance for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia arriving next autumn. They also defined the precondition of all conditions and preconditions /also political/: to have all socially-owned firms say, within 30 day's time, whether they want to be privatized or to become state-owned, with the evaluation of such firms' property and the determination of new owners being completed within three months. No further details are necessary, and the direction of thinking is clear. The answer will, to all intents and purposes, come at the end of May from the symposium of the theoreticians who worked on the famous "memorandum" at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, therefore, a theoretic explanation and justification of an administrative economy is to be expected.

The acceptance of such a concept, according to experts of the Institute for social studies, unavoidably leads to the "zero version", defined as a lack of serious positive changes on the internal and foreign plane, which would generally mean a drop in this year's production by around 30 percent /from around 11 billion US dollars last year/. The only worse version than the "zero" one is the "scenario of situations characterized by incidents", that is, such social tensions and turmoil that "could slide into the introduction of a state of emergency or, which is more realistic, towards a system of retrograde values, cheap populism, rampant nationalism, the militant radicalization and the further social and economic destruction of the region". Unfortunately, conclude the authors of the project, the developments in the first four months of this year acceleratedly lead towards the scenario of "situations characterized by incidents".