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The Regions This Week
November 2, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 9
Southeast Europe
The Croatian government announced plans to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II) in 2020 as a step of joining the Eurozone. European Commission Vice-President for the Euro and Social Dialogue Valdis Dombrovskis said the Commission supports Croatia on its journey
to the euro area, not just politically, but also through a structural reform programme.
The IMF expects Kosovo’s economic growth to reach around 4% in 2018 and will be among the highest in the region. An IMF mission concluded that growth will be led by investment, consumption, and service exports, which in turn are underpinned by strong bank lending and remittance inflows.
A Macedonian court temporarily froze the property belonging to the main opposition party VMRO-DPMNE as part of a probe related to suspected unlawful financing of the party. The decision was at the request of the special pub- lic prosecutor related to the case named Talir (Thaler) in which 14 people are charged with money laundering through the party.
Almost a quarter of the nightclubs in Roma-
nia still operate without fire safety permits, almost three years after a fire which burst out
a nightclub in Bucharest killed 64 people and injured more than 100, the emergency situations inspectorate IGSU announced.
Bulgaria’s specialised court pardoned former foreign affairs minister Daniel Mitov but sentenced his former deputy Hristo Angelichin to four years in jail for abuse of office. So far Angelichin is Bulgaria’s first former top official to be sentenced and many speculate that he was an easy victim as his party is no longer close to Prime Minister Boyko Borissov.
Macedonia continues to lead the region in the World Bank Doing Business report. The country
climbed one spot to 10th in the 2019 edition of the report, putting it well ahead of its Western Balkans peers.
A Turkish ship is to commence drilling for oil and gas in the Mediterranean on October 31, Turkey’s Energy Minister Fatih Donmez announced.The development could raise tensions with neighbouring Cyprus and Greece over jurisdiction.
Albania to will start construction work at the idled Kukes airport in 2019. Tirana Inter- national Airport (TIA) is currently the only ac- tive airport in Albania but the authorities plan to open new airports in the country after the exclusive rights over international flights that TIA enjoyed were removed in April 2016.
The EU granted Bosnia over €7.2mn to help tackle the significant inflow of migrants and to improve its border management. Bosnia is struggling to accommodate the constantly in- creasing number of migrants and, in the past week, there were high tensions on its border with Croatia as several hundred migrants gathered there, attempting to cross the border and enter the EU member state.
Moldova’s central bank maintained the policy interest rate at 6.5%, only 1.5pp above the 5% +/-1.5pp inflation target, but well above the infla- tion that has recently hovered around 3% and
is decelerating. The policy rate has remained unchanged since the end of 2017.
Romania’s general government budget deficit more than doubled, growing by 2.5 times y/y to RON16.77bn (€3.6bn) in January-September, the finance ministry announced. The deficit-to-GDP ratio more than doubled to 1.8% this year, from 0.8% in 2017.