60m euros will go towards war categories from 2019 budget

Berat Thaci, policy analyst at the GAP Institute, tells Kosovo that the draft budget in principle remains an asphalt budget, because the Ministry of Infrastructure dominates the capital investment structure for roads with about 48 per cent of the total budget.

He says there is a slight increase in the budget for the health and justice sector, but according to him, they are not enough, separately in health when it is known that this sector is quite in serious condition.

“Gati half of capital projects are managed by the Ministry of Infrastructure. Consequently, the results are not expected as far as economic radiation is concerned. Economic growth with this budget will continue to be insufficient for the needs of the labour market or for the needs of overall development in Kosovo. Another striking thing is that there is a slight increase in certain sectors such as health and rule of law. This is positive but not enough to make significant improvements, especially in the health sector”, Thaci says.

The 2019 draft budget, expected to be 2.3 billion euros, is also oriented on social schemes, which, according to Thaci, harm the country's perspective.

In fact, Thaci said that only for the categories of war with next year's budget, it is meant to be around 60m euros.

“generally social schemes have increased markedly. We have a budget that now focuses more on social schemes at the expense of capital investments that are more likely to foster economic development... We are sacrificing the future and economic development because of the concentration in consumption”, Thaci says.

Even the professor at the Economic Faculty, Nagip Skkurrier, says that this type of budget distribution or budget distribution shows that there is little performance in terms of budget sharing in the context of economic development, but rather the budget is focused on social maintenance, in terms of the field of health, education and KSF.

“Budget is not a developmental but a consumer budget. On the other hand, the fact is that this year is also the founding of the military, respectively, a part of the budget goes towards Kosovo security forces... The budget for 2019 does not have much to do with projections related to Kosovo's economic development and the opening of new jobs, but there is more to preserving social welfare”, Skari says.

While, financial expert Iron Murati points out for Kosova Prees that in the past, there has usually been sub-prisonment in the category of single-time revenues, as in the case of revenues from telecom sales, different licenses, or even divisions.

He says a considerable sum of such revenues is also planned this time mainly by AKP funds, which will hardly be realised according to plan, since it depends more on the tribunal.

When in the share of expenditures, the only category that is common is not realised according to budgeting is that of capital expenditures. That's because the line ministries don't do adequate project planning and lack capacity to implement them. So in 2019 my opinion will follow the same trend”, Murati declares.

For social schemes, Murati says they have already reached almost the pay rate, and the problem is that it is expected to increase further.

According to him, it is an unbearable burden for the country in the medium and long term, and it gives poor prognosis in terms of economic development and financial sustainability. That's because social schemes are running expenses, and once they grow once, it's almost impossible to reduce.

Murati even warns that this brings inevitable to the need for tax hikes, which is also difficult to consider as low employment rates.