The Way to a Better Future: Remaining Challenges

Abstract

The global financial and economic crisis of 2008–9 that began in August 2007 with the sub-prime loans crisis in the US, affected Serbia very seriously, but with a delay of over a year. Like most countries in Eastern Europe, Serbia initially seemed resilient to the global financial crisis, but from mid-2008 it began to feel the effects very strongly. With the global financial and economic crisis, what emerged to the surface was not only the fragility of Serbia’s economy, due to the model of credit-driven growth and the resulting high dependence on capital inflows from abroad. The global economic crisis also revealed more general flaws of the transition strategy pursued in Serbia after 2001.