You Cannot Spend What You Don’t Have

In unsuccessful economies, the people responsible for shaping the business environment focus on allocating wealth; in successful economies they focus on helping to create wealth, the Principle Deputy High Representative, Lawrence Butler, wrote in a newspaper article today, stressing that changing this focus in Bosnia and Herzegovina is critical to getting the country into the fast lane of economic development.

“To create more wealth,Bosnia and Herzegovina needs to speed up privatisation, amend its labour laws to create a more flexible recruitment market; and reduce the red tape involved in setting up new companies and winding up unsuccessful old ones,” Ambassador Butler wrote in Euroblic.

The legislative steps needed to turn this wish list into practical reality have already been negotiated, Ambassador Butler explained. They include enacting a Law on Obligations, so that a single commercial code can be applied across the entire country, making the National Fiscal Council fully operational, and centralising banking supervision so as to strengthen guarantees for savers and free up more capital for investment in jobs.

“By enacting these and other agreed economic reforms in the first months of their four-year term the new administrations can lay the foundations for sustained and rapid economic growth,” Ambassador Butler concluded. “All that is required is political will, common sense and a clear understanding that in order to share wealth you have to create it first.”

The text of the Principal Deputy High Representative’s article can be accessed at www.ohr.int.