Abstract
The welfare provision in Serbia is one of the areas of public policies determined to the largest extent by economic decisions and it has been facing fundamental demographic and economic challenges. The author first depicts the context of current welfare state reforms, from the period of socialism to transition and today. The main characteristic of demographic changes, as presented in Chap. 2, is ageing of the population. Along with demographic changes, another, even larger challenge to the national welfare state, is the economic situation in the national context. Chapter 3 explores the basic indicators of the labour market in the period of the crisis and focuses primarily on the anti-crisis measures directed towards the welfare system. The national welfare state is traditionally designed along the so-called old social risks, with negligible orientation of its policies toward the new ones. Therefore, in Chap. 4, pension, labour market, health, social care, family, as well as long-term care policies are taken into consideration. The concluding chapter points to possible trajectories of the welfare state reforms in Serbia.
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- 1.
Serbia started the so called “de-blocked” transformation only in 2000. Until then, many ex-socialist countries passed a long way from socialism to capitalism and passed over many transition “diseases”.
- 2.
Throughout the whole chapter on the Serbian welfare state, Eurostat databases were used where available. Otherwise, the national databases were used.
- 3.
“Due to that, economic and social policies were managed separately of each other, and also theoretical fundamentals of economic development and economic policy were developed independently of social development and social policy” (Šefer 1991: 19).
- 4.
For example, the problem of the high unemployment rate was “remedied” by the introduction of an early retirement scheme. This only deferred the unemployment problem, while the public pension funds have continued to face even more serious financing problems due to massive numbers of newly retirees.
- 5.
In 1991 the population of Serbia was 9,779,991; in 2002 it was 7,498,001 (RZS 2011a). The methodology applied in the census of 2002 was partially changed compared to that of 1991 and therefore the data are not directly comparable.
- 6.
At the beginning of the 1990s, refugees from former Yugoslavian states inflicted with civil war came to Serbia and in 1999 internally displaced persons from Kosovo came to Serbia.
- 7.
The World Economic Forum’s report puts Serbia in the group of the first 10 countries impacted by brain drain (Pejin Stokić and Grečić 2012).
- 8.
“According to the estimations of certain authors, nowadays between 2.2 million (Grečić and Lopušina 1994) and 3.1 million of Serbian emigrants live outside Serbia and countries of the region (former Yugoslavian states)” (Nikitović 2010: 98).
- 9.
In 2013, the old age dependency ratio was 25.9 (Eurostat 2014).
- 10.
The First National Report on Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction of 2011 points out: “the first hit of the crisis additionally aggravated the labour market position of vulnerable populations, especially young people, persons without school qualifications, rural inhabitants, refugees and internally displaced persons” (Vlada RS 2011: 111).
- 11.
It cannot be expected that there will be a huge and immediate improvement in the employment situation, partly due to many redundant employees in the public sector. It is not certain that these redundant numbers could be absorbed by the employment in the private sector. A part of the explanation can be also found in the situation on the labour market during the 2000s: “Rapid growth of real salaries resulted in decreased demand for labour force […] due to reduced resources available to companies for the investment purposes” (Pavlović 2006: 270).
- 12.
Economic crisis and its impact on the Serbian economy with a framework programme of measures directed towards the reduction of the effects of crisis was endorsed in December 2008.
- 13.
- 14.
The calculation refers to the amounts of average salary and child allowance in July 2013.
- 15.
See for example European Commission’s The 2009 Ageing Report of 2009.
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Perišić, N. (2016). The Serbian Welfare State: A Transition Loser. In: Schubert, K., de Villota, P., Kuhlmann, J. (eds) Challenges to European Welfare Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07680-5_28
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