Improving business environment at a local level is essential for stimulating local development, and thus promoting the general business climate in Serbia. However, there are many challenges in this area: the main one relates to a lack of regular dialogue between the public and private sectors. Also, the level of communication between local self-governments and other public institutions is not satisfactory, which indicates the need for a number of activities that will promote dialogue between all relevant actors. Third, in towns and municipalities there are different institutional forms that deal with local economic development. Although the administrative units that deal with these issues are often formed as local economic development offices, there is great diversity in the organizational structure, as well as the scope of work of these offices.

Based on criteria such as investment opportunities and investment of private and public capital in one country, Serbia is on the 89th place out of 183 countries ranked by the World Bank. Our goal is to help towns and municipalities in Serbia to bring about a change in local business climate.

In this regard, our aim is to improve dialogue and interaction between these actors through this program component, to improve the capacity of local self-governments and the SCTM in order to create a favourable business climate at the local level, and to raise awareness in local self-governments about the importance of improving the local regulatory framework.

The first activity that we plan to implement is the development of the Study on the business climate at local level and, within that activity, an analysis of the business climate at the local level, with particular focus on the review of existing economic activities of towns and municipalities. Based on the outputs of that analysis, the proposal of quantitative and qualitative indicators and sub-indicators for the regular annual monitoring of business climate in towns and municipalities will be defined. All this will be the basis for the definition of recommendations to the Standing Conference of Towns and Municipalities and local self-governments to improve the business climate, as well as for the proposal for activities whose implementation can contribute to its improvement.

Also, not less important, one of the upcoming activities is the establishment of the Network of Offices for Local Economic Development that will greatly contribute to a quality exchange of good practices and knowledge in this field.

Contact person: Darko Drndić, Component Coordinator, darko.drndic@skgo.org