More experts needed in administration to join EU faster

More experts needed in administration to join EU faster

"The number of employees in Serbia's administration per capita, excluding government companies, is actually lower than in the countries of the EU or in the middle," Deputy Prime Minister Kori Udovicki said in her opening address at the debate, entitled Measuring the Performance of the Public Sector in Serbia: Why, How and for Whom.

"We have yet to hire the type of people we need in order to be able to lead Serbia into the EU, people who can do analyses so our policies would be better, who can improve the service provided to the people," said Udovicki, who is also the minister of state and local administration.

The main goal is to improve the efficiency of the admistration, she pointed out.

"The next thing to do is to analyse the effects of laws and make policy corrections, but we in fact do not have enough qualified people and good organisations to achieve that," she noted.

Deputy Head of the EU Delegation to Serbia Oscar Benedict said the EU standard was that public servants had to be efficient and few in numbers.

’’The EU wants to see sustainable reforms in terms of their implementation’’, he stated.

’’The European Commission pointed out in 20 of its recommendations from the reports on the screening process related to chapters 23 and 24 of the accession talks that Serbia needed to develop ways of monitoring the results, while 7 of the recommendations stressed the necessity of developing a mechanism to evaluate the policies related to those chapters’’, Benedict remarked.

’’The EU would like to see action plans to the implementation of reforms related to various chapters of the talks’’, he said.

’’Cooperation between the government and the civil sector is necessary for Serbia's EU integration and the process should be transparent and inclusive’’, he stated.

Head of the Foundation for the Development of Economics (FREN) Jelena Zarkovic-Rakic underscored that Serbia still lacked a system for monitoring and evaluating public policies.

The recent creation of the Secretariat for Public Policies is important in that sense, as it will coordinate the work of the ministries.

Head of the Centre for European Policy (CEP) Nebojsa Lazarevic thinks that there is no general strategy among more than a hundred existing strategies related to public administration.

The debate was organised by the FREN and CEP, who had conducted an EU-funded research project on the topic, whose results they presented on Tuesday.