Sectors
Five markets we know from both sides.
Topics
Five questions that cut across every market.
Services
Economic analysis for governments, donors and international organisations: we diagnose sectors and public spending, design and cost programmes, and evaluate what they changed.Economic analysis for companies and investors: we size markets and plan entry, find and assess firms to buy, and model what a business is worth.
Topic
Evidence
Competitiveness comes down to what a worker produces and the capital behind that work. A worker in Serbia produces about half as much as a worker in the EU, in purchasing power terms, and each year less than half as much is invested per worker in machinery and equipment.
Producesoutput per person employed, EU = 100, in PPS, 2025Serbia 51EU 100
Equipmentmachinery and equipment invested per person employed, EU = 100, 2025Serbia 46EU 100
Eurostat, labour productivity and investment by asset, 2025 (provisional); equipment per worker our calculation
Context
For ministries, agencies and donorsFor companies and investors
Serbia invests as large a share of its income as the EU, yet a worker still produces far less than in Europe. Much of that investment has gone into infrastructure and new plants, while many domestic firms, from workshops to mid-sized manufacturers, have upgraded slowly. With labour scarce, growth can no longer come mainly from adding jobs; it has to come from better equipment, processes and management inside the firms that are already here.
Public support for business is paid mainly per new job, with more in less developed areas and tax holidays for the largest projects. It brought plants and work to places that needed them, but it rewards headcount more than what each worker produces, and domestic small and mid-sized firms get far less of it than large and foreign investors. Programmes for small firms are modest, change from year to year and are rarely judged against firms they did not reach. Foreign investment lifts domestic firms mainly through supplier links, and the question for policy is how the same support could bring more of that: capability, equipment and management inside firms, chosen where it is likely to last and measured by what changed.
We reviewed Serbia’s profile for two editions of the OECD’s competitiveness assessments and follow a supplier development programme firm by firm, on the shop floor and in the accounts.
For a company, the gap is a market. Many established domestic firms still run on old equipment and informal management, and with labour scarce, automation, better processes, business software and engineering pay back faster than they did. That opens room for suppliers of equipment and know-how, for lenders and lessors who can read a firm’s accounts, and for buyers of sound firms that have underinvested, often where the founder is thinking about succession. Public support helps only at the margin, and a case built on cheap labour is weaker each year. The firms that pull ahead plan for scarce labour from the start, build a local supplier base, and judge each target on its own accounts rather than on the sector average.
We test firms on their own filed accounts against every peer in their industry, and know which incentives apply and what they require in return.
Direction
What we do here
Examples of our work
Review of the fifteen draft chapters of the policy assessment for Serbia, from investment and competition to agriculture and the environment, against evidence from institutions and from the people the policies reach.
A panel of manufacturing firms is visited on site every year, with owners and the heads of finance, production, sales and people, while the filed accounts of every firm in the programme are tracked alongside. Each co-financed tool is scored for whether it is still in use, and results are read against prices, local wages and sector employment.
Official enterprise statistics and company accounts by detailed activity over a decade, trade data and a review of ministry, agency and donor programmes, set against five EU comparators. The four sectors are food, machinery and equipment, rubber and plastics, and wood and furniture.
Ten years of statutory accounts, the company’s own management model reconciled with the books, revenue by client and type of work, and a bridge from reported to recurring profit, ending in a valuation range against regional deal multiples and a price split between a fixed and a deferred part.
A desk screen of firms in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, drawn from business registers, regulators’ market data, routing registries and procurement records. Each firm is scored on six criteria, a top score requires a register or regulator source, and every open fact is listed with the check that would settle it.
What we do here
Examples of our work
Ten years of statutory accounts, the company’s own management model reconciled with the books, revenue by client and type of work, and a bridge from reported to recurring profit, ending in a valuation range against regional deal multiples and a price split between a fixed and a deferred part.
A desk screen of firms in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia, drawn from business registers, regulators’ market data, routing registries and procurement records. Each firm is scored on six criteria, a top score requires a register or regulator source, and every open fact is listed with the check that would settle it.
Review of the fifteen draft chapters of the policy assessment for Serbia, from investment and competition to agriculture and the environment, against evidence from institutions and from the people the policies reach.
A panel of manufacturing firms is visited on site every year, with owners and the heads of finance, production, sales and people, while the filed accounts of every firm in the programme are tracked alongside. Each co-financed tool is scored for whether it is still in use, and results are read against prices, local wages and sector employment.
Official enterprise statistics and company accounts by detailed activity over a decade, trade data and a review of ministry, agency and donor programmes, set against five EU comparators. The four sectors are food, machinery and equipment, rubber and plastics, and wood and furniture.
Earlier experience
Before Econominess, Nemanja Šormaz spent years on the research behind programmes that help Serbian firms compete, and on how the state supports investment.
A diagnostic of Serbia’s competitiveness by firm size, industry and region, built on the accounts of some 68,000 firms, trade in about 800 products and a survey of more than a thousand companies; then baselines of two private-sector programmes, and yearly assessments of a five-year value-chain programme that compared supported firms with firms it did not reach and checked what firms reported against their filed accounts.
A policy study of state aid built on a profile of several hundred greenfield foreign investors, a project on publishing state-aid data openly and tracking the quality of subsidised investment and, as supervising director, a census of firms controlled from one of Serbia’s main trading partners.
A baseline survey of close to 900 small and mid-sized firms in two sectors, a sector analysis, yearly assessments against the sector as a whole, and an index of SME competitiveness built on an annual survey and company accounts.
A common method for the six economies, research in three and coordination of partners in three, and country and regional reports ranking measures by impact, political commitment, counterpart capacity and timing.
The other side
Where firms have underinvested, and what it takes to catch up.How support could raise productivity, not only jobs.
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Company profile, PDF · Belgrade, Serbia