Fiscal Stress Analysis in the Republic of Serbia

Abstract

Abstract The goal is to examine the level of fiscal stress in the Republic of Serbia and to investigate whetherit suggests a crisis of public debt. The empirical analysis of annual data has been done for the period 2007 to 2014, in two cases: (i) charging indicators of the vulnerability boundaries to the fiscal crisis using the signal approach (ii) an assessment of whether the public debt is reduced at a satisfactory pace by applying the criterion of the operationalisation of debt. The resulting composite indicator points to a crisis of public debt in the Republic of Serbia. The investigation of fiscal and macrofinancial variables showed that the public sector and private sector (macro-financial side) have over-consumption followed the process of the accumulation of the public debt. The outputs suggest that the level of the public debt in 2016 is above the benchmarks, which means that there is a violation of the operationalisation of the debt criterion in 2014.