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РPУRБOРJEИCКTАS
FISCAST:
Fiscal responsibility,
transparency and sustainability
of the fiscal finance in Macedonia
Blagica Petreski According to the prestigious Transparency was conducted by Finance
magazine “Business Insider”, Think – the Institute for Economic Re-
Chief economist and executive Macedonia is a country with search and Policies, Skopje, and it is sup-
director of Finance Think – Insti- convincingly lowest business ported by the British Embassy in Skopje.
tute for Economic Research and taxes in the world, with an The goal of the project is double: to im-
Policies – Skopje effective tax rate of only 7.4%. Howev- prove the capacity of the civil society
er, within a relatively short time of ap- and the media to contribute for the eco-
proximately seven years, the public debt nomic dialogue in this country, on the
doubled, from 23% at the end of 2008 basis of evidence, enabling more partici-
to 46.5% of GDP at the end of 2015. The patory and more transparent creation of
public debate largely arguments that the the policies; and second, to increase the
current level of the public debt already awareness of the public about the pro-
threatens the sustainability of the public cess of spending public money. In order
finance. However, the policy of borrow- to meet the goal, a set of activities was
ing is not problematic, the problematic realized, which covered building a core-
issue is how to spend the public money. network of organizations, experts and
Will the debts we make today produce economic journalists, capacity building
larger benefits in the future, will they in- for cost-benefit analysis and tools to in-
crease the payoff power of the country crease the public awareness on how to
and will they improve the life standard spend the public money.
of the citizens? In this direction, greater
responsibility and transparency is re- When we speak of the public debate
quired in the creation of the policies and about the fiscal finance, usually there
the spending of public money. The topic is a polarized debate where the policies
of fiscal responsibility, sustainability are black or white, and an absence of
and transparency increased its intensity an evidence and research-based debate,
in the past years. The project FISCAST: At the same time, the research in the
FISCal Accountability, Sustainability and fiscal finance, particularly at a micro-
Transparency is built on the idea to de- level for policies with important fiscal
bate on the spending of public money, implications or policies that are impor-
on the basis of research evidence, which tant to the citizens, are rare. The pres-
in this specific project are provided ent research is mostly concentrated in
through a useful research tool - cost- the capital, while the organizations at
benefit analysis. The project FISCAST: a local level were rarely included in re-
FISCal Accountability, Sustainability and search activities on topics that are im-
portant for their local communities. In
36 May 2016
