Serbia's 600 million euro cash handout: who gets what

The package of one-off payments the state will pay out in September carries a price tag of roughly 600 million euros, close to 70 billion dinars at the current exchange rate. The measures were announced piece by piece over the past weeks, so this is the first time the full cost has been added up and the funding explained.

Finance Minister Sinisa Mali gave the dates on July 27, at an extraordinary session of the National Assembly. Pensioners receive the money on September 14, everyone else of legal age eight days later, on September 22.

Who gets how much

The payout comes in two waves, with different amounts:

• pensioners: 35,000, 27,500 or 20,000 dinars (about 299, 235 and 171 euros), depending on the size of the pension
• all adult citizens: 6,000 dinars (about 51 euros)
• recipients of social assistance and child allowance
• recipients of veterans’ and disability protection, plus registered war veterans

Mali put the pensioners’ tiers this way: “Some pensioners will get 35,000 dinars, some will get 27,500 dinars, some will get 20,000 dinars.” On the second wave he said: “On September 22, we will pay 6,000 dinars to every adult citizen in our Serbia, as a token of attention.”

Why doesn’t everyone get paid from the Share Fund?

Because the fund was set up in 2007, and only those who were already of legal age that year hold a claim on it directly. Citizens who were minors then, or not yet born, own no shares in the fund, so their 6,000 dinars comes out of the state budget instead. For part of the population the sum will not be identical either, because some hold more shares and are therefore owed more.

President Aleksandar Vucic has criticised the existing law because the state now also has to pay out the value of shares to the heirs of shareholders who have died in the meantime.

For the payout to be legally possible at all, parliament is expected to adopt amendments to the laws governing the Share Fund in early September, under urgent procedure. That leaves a little over a week between the vote and the first payment day.

The three percent deficit line

The real test of this package is not what lands in individual accounts, but whether 600 million euros fits inside the fiscal frame. Serbia agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to hold the budget deficit at three percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and one-off transfers on this scale were not part of the original arithmetic.

Milos Obradovic, economics editor at the daily Danas, reckons the government expects to stay inside that limit:

I believe they have calculated that this will not break the budget deficit of three percent, which they agreed with the IMF

Obradovic also points back to the one-off payments of 2020, financed by fresh borrowing, which in his assessment fed the inflation that followed. The Fiscal Council criticised that mechanism at the time, and it remains the only domestic precedent for a transfer of this width.

What comes next

This is not the only one-off measure we have covered this year: we published an earlier piece on tourist vouchers for pensioners, which does not appear anywhere in the 600 million euro calculation.

The date that decides the outcome is not September 14 but the day parliament votes on the legal amendments. Until that happens, the payout is an announcement and nothing more. After it, the numbers worth watching are narrower: how much of the 600 million euros is genuinely covered by the assets of the Share Fund, how much by the budget, and whether the deficit holds under three percent through the end of the year.