Prime Minister of Republika Srpska Željka Cvijanović said that the representatives of RS Government and the Ministry of Finance of Republika Srpska are in regular contact with the IMF and the World Bank, and added that she expects the following tranche to be paid to the entities early next year.
“The mitigating factor is that our Letter of Intent is largely based on the Reform Agenda which we harmonized previously and whose 11th version was finally adopted when the requests of Republika Srpska were accepted. The Reform Agenda is literally the rewritten Economic Policy of ours, which we adopted for this year. thus, we have three documents that are important for us: our Economic Policy from which the Reform Agenda derived, and the Letter of Intent which derived from the Reform Agenda and which has very similar or identical tasks, which facilitates this entire process,” said Cvijanović.
Cvijanović added that the Letter of Intent is available to the public and that there are no hidden conditions, stating that harmonization of the letter took so long because attention was being paid to every sentence, so that every doubt is crystal clear and so that it is clear what is expected from the institutions of Republika Srpska, in order to avoid different interpretations afterwards.
Cvijanović stated that the Government of Srpska has the obligation to reduce public consumption and that they know exactly what should be done in the entire public sector. Administration is just one dimension of that, thus there is no new employments and added costs. She added that they will behave like this with or without the IMF, because that is the right thing to do.
“We take care of our citizens. Of course it would be easier to send several thousand people home and say that it significantly facilitates the budget situation, but we are taking care of the people who need to live their lives, who have their families, their credits. However, they also must understand the endeavors of institutions. We must implement this rationalization without causing damage to anyone,” Cvijanović said.
Furthermore, she emphasized that the Government will do it because workers are partners of the Government in the entire process and they understand that this is something that has to be dome, but that they will try to do it without any painful cuts.
Cvijanović stated that cooperation with the IMF has been in a crisis for a while, but that the authorities of Republika Srpska and FBiH managed to negotiate the Letter of Intent and to get the arrangement which was approved in early September and which is now in the implementation stage.
According to her, there are several open issues, but those are not unsolvable, but only the issues that need to be discussed further.
(Source: oslobodjenje.ba)
