Ambassador Bradić at the "Diaspora Investment and Business Conference" in Zurich

Ambassador Bradić emphasized that in the past period - despite the difficulties due to the pandemic and geopolitical challenges - Serbia has maintained economic, political, financial and energy stability, and that even in such circumstances it has achieved enviable results, illustrating this with data on the growth in the volume of exchange of goods and services with Switzerland in the first three quarters of this year, as well as the previous two years.

He pointed to the constant growth of Serbia's GDP, the fact that the country's public debt (53.7% of GDP) and budget deficit (38% of GDP) remained under control, while at the same time recording a low unemployment rate (9.8%), as well as an excellent result in attracting foreign direct investment of 3 billion euros in the first nine months. He cited the fact that the export of services in the ICT sector has become the most valuable export branch and that a record income of 2.7 billion euros is expected this year, which would almost double the result from 2020 (1.44 billion euros).

Ambassador Bradić also presented data from the economic barometer, which was presented in Switzerland this month and which points to the growing importance of Central and Eastern European countries in the field of so-called "nirshoring" and "outsourcing", i.e. bringing production and/or service provision locations closer together, or relocating them to other regions, in which Serbia has significant opportunities that can also be used by businesspeople from the diaspora. In this context, he also cited several positive examples of investments by our and Swiss businesspeople in the past three quarters.

The President of the Swiss Chamber of Commerce for Central and Eastern Europe, Oliver Berchinger, underlined the growing importance of Serbia for Swiss companies and illustrated this with the data that in the first three quarters of this year, various machines worth 224 million francs were imported into our country from Switzerland - which is 80% more than in the same period last year, and represents a record increase compared to all export industries of this country, but is also an indicator of production growth in Serbia.

The participants of this, second conference, were also addressed by Miroslav Lutovac, advisor to the President of the Chamber of Deputies of the Republic of Srpska, Ninoslav Erić, a member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Srpska, as well as Uroš Živković from the team leading the "Point of Return" project, which was founded by the Cabinet of the RS Chamber of Deputies.