Goran Radosavljevic (Photo: PrintScreen YouTube)
Economist Goran Radosavljevic said on July 26 that the purchasing power of Serbian citizens in the past year had appreciably decreased and that a drastic drop in the standard of living was looming.
Radosavljevic told BETA that statistics at the moment were not a real indicator of what was really happening in terms of the population's standard of living.
He stressed that the average salary in Serbia had increased to a relatively high level and that not only average prices, but the cost of staples, were catching up.
"The essential problem is that Serbian citizens spend the bulk of their income on food, residential costs and energy and the cost of these three categories has significantly gone up," he said.
"Food prices in Serbia have gone up considerably on average compared with the EU, while the cost of energy hasn't because these costs are controlled by the state and it is only a question of when this will happen. The price of housing has seen a drastic jump in the price of a square meter and when we take these three components we arrive at the fact that inflation is not the 11 percent that statistics say it is and that the inflation rate that affects the largest number of citizens is 15, 20 and more percent," Radosavljevic stressed.
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