22/01/2024
The European Union is financing a project in Serbia that will work for three years with European specialists with the aim of accompanying the country on its way to joining the European single market
View of Belgrade
Trade in goods between Spain and Serbia has doubled between 2015 and 2021, reaching over 720 million euros in 2021. In addition, between January and August 2022, bilateral trade amounted to 656 million euros.
This has made it easier for Spain to accompany Serbia through the project, “European Union for an Internal Market, EU4IM, which has European funding and aims to accompany the country on its path to access the European single market, implementing the necessary legal, institutional and management reforms.
The project, led by the FIIAPP, from Spain in collaboration with the Slovak Agency (SlovakAid, SAIDC) and the Italian Agency (AICS), will work on competition, consumer protection and market supervision and will have specialists from institutions such as the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office and the Spanish Consumer Agency. But mainly, it will focus on the area of competition advocacy, so the Spanish institution of reference in this project is the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC), which also provides a long-term leading expert in the field.
In addition, the FIIAPP supervises the project as a whole and must ensure that its implementation has an impact, that it generates the desired changes, guaranteeing results-oriented planning; efficient and effective technical and financial management, well-adapted implementation methodologies, coordination between the different partners and the different areas of intervention, establishing synergies and complementarities, a good monitoring and reporting system and useful information and knowledge management systems.
The project will work in 8 key intervention areas for Single Market entry: competition, state aid, market surveillance, product quality infrastructure, consumer protection, e-commerce, one-stop-shop, and intellectual property rights. Its specific objective is to strengthen the capacities of the 8 administrative units responsible for these areas. To this end, it will work with the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Economy and additionally the Intellectual Property Rights Office, the Competition Commission, and the State Aid Commission, in order to undertake the necessary improvements and implement the recommendations of the European Union in order to align its legislation and regulations but also its institutions and procedures.
