Partner: U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

Year: 2014

The objective of the assignment was to assess the performance and shed light on the most promising industries, with the potential to drive sustainable growth and development of Serbia’s economy through enhanced international competitiveness and exporting activities. In addition, this research also shed light on industries that have obvious market potential but struggle to achieve their goals and realize this potential full potential.

The research represents CEVES foundational research of Serbia’s real sector economy, and most importantly, it is the one of a kind in Serbia. By this study, CEVES set the foundation and contributed to the evidence-based policy making in Serbia. The particular result was shedding light on good performing SME-based sectors, which were at the time significantly underrated. This research brought series of innovation in sectors analysis in Serbia: introducing the performance analysis of average/median company in the sector (not only overall sectors performance), bridging different international classifications that enabled joint analyses of general firms’ performance and international performance etc. CEVES invested time in cleaning SBRA database and identifying bona fide companies (separating those that conduct “real” businesses, and earn from it, from those uncreditworthy and/or with irregular reporting) and conducted assessment only on those. The assessment included preparing of series of different financial and international performance indicators; which were statistically analyzed by multivariate Principal Component Analysis (PCA).

Report