ANALYSIS
AmCham Comments
on Macedonia’s 2016
Economic Reform Program
The European Commission invites all enlargement
countries to prepare annual Economic Reform Programmes (ERPs); Macedonia, along with all other Western Balkan countries and Turkey, submitted its first
annual ERP in January 2015. This exercise is meant to
help candidate countries and potential candidates to
enhance their economic policy and its governance as
well as their “institutional and analytical capacities and
to prepare them for participation in the EU’s multilateral surveillance and economic policy coordination procedures upon accession.”1
payment by budget users toward the private sector
contributes significantly to the liquidity problem in the
country. With the adoption of the Law in 2013, this
problem was compounded, since the Law doesn’t apply
to all budget users, which exposed the part of the private sector that depends on payment from their budget user clients to additional risk. The Law positions the
government in the role of protector of small to medium
companies from clients that intentionally delay payment to them to their own advantage. However, the
Law introduced new fines that are occasionally issued
against private sector entities, regardless of context (e.g., outstanding collections from their clients that are budget
users).
Late payment by budget users toward
the private sector contributes significantly
to the liquidity problem in the country.
In late December 2015, AmCham Macedonia was
invited to review and comment on a draft of the Macedonia’s 2016 ERP. While just 6 working days were
allowed for this process, AmCham organized a number of meetings and collected feedback from an impressive number of members to ensure its final comments
were an accurate reflection of companies’ reaction to
the proposed reforms. Generally, AmCham members
felt the proposed program did not adequately address
the areas they felt were most relevant and in most
urgent need of reform attention. The following are key
excerpts from those comments, which should be published in full as an Annex to the final 2016 ERP which
the Ministry of Finance should publish very soon.
The National Program should include reforms
necessary to [