PDK: Kurti government is deepening poverty, remove VAT, excise, and raise wages

The rise in prices of all essential products, inflation, and the government's failure to act with concrete packages is causing families to go towards poverty, Western workers and firms to default.

Blerand Stavileci, counting the challenges Kosovo citizens are facing today, has said the only government in the world that is not accepting the crisis and is not acting to facilitate it, is the Government of Albin Kurti.

The completion of Kosovo firms with unstable arbitrary decisions reduces revenues for them and has a direct effect on cutting jobs and increasing unemployment. Unemployment creates uncertainty. Unemployment and uncertainty produce family, social and psychological crises, and family, social and psychological crises are producing evacuations and increasing record ranks of evacuations in front of foreign embassies. Families are heading towards poverty, workers west and firms towards bankruptcy”, Stavileci has said.

Furthermore, Stavileci has said that in addition to the pandemic and energy crisis, the number one enemy for all families, workers and firms has become inflation.

Albin Kurt's “governments should not behave like serhirds. The government is not a spectator, it should be an actress and a promotion of development. And if he can do that, then minimally let him make sure that citizens and families help cope with these crises”, Stavileci said.

While the Finance Department Co-ordinator at the Government for Good Governance, Arben Mustafa, has said the pace with which inflation is taking place in Kosovo poses a very serious concern for the country's economy, while the government's current behaviour towards these developments has been negligent and irresponsible.

The refusal to use the government's available fiscal instruments, such as the excise and the State Value Tax, has created conditions for inflation to accelerate the pace of growth. Developments in international markets, including depreciation of euro currency to the US dollar, suggest the inflation crisis will only get worse”, Mustafa said.

Furthermore, he has added that the integration of expectations for inflation in the decisions of citizens and firms in Kosovo risks creating a new wave of inflation, which is no longer linked only to imported products, but also domestic products and services.

He said the tendency to address the problem of inflation through the control of profit margins is a wrong and unwise policy for several reasons:

“S first, before considering the control of profit margins, the Government should provide professional analysis-based evidence proving that rising prices of essential products in Kosovo is happening due to the abuse of profit margins and not because of market developments. Second, the control of profit margins, which also represents price control, violates the functioning of free market economy, hinders competition, and can produce additional problems for the country's economy. Third, the mood of the current government to intervene in private sector prices, instead of using available economic policy instruments, jeopardises economic freedom and creates uncertainty about the future of Kosovo's free market economy. Fourth, international experiences show that price control policies in the past have proven unsuccessful in fighting inflation”, Arben Mustafa has said.

According to Mustafa, the government should not waste time further by improvised with measures, but is urgently required to exercise its role, using fiscal policy to influence price hikes.

“It is urgent and necessary to become free from VAT of essential consumer goods for a certain period and remove excise and subtract T VSH in oil products, as well as for a certain time period”, he said.