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Five markets we know from both sides.
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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.
Selected work
Engagements since 2015, on both sides of the market, and earlier projects at CEVES.
Nothing matches all of these filters.
The study covers the whole market, built from six years of statutory accounts of every registered private provider. We classified providers by hand into clinical niches that official codes do not show and measured growth, margins, cash conversion, concentration and ownership in each, with an econometric projection of private spending to 2030.
Read the caseA job-level model of general government pay, anchored on evaluated positions and run on 2023 data, simulates the move to a single pay base without pay cuts. It compares scenarios and phasing under the fiscal rule by sector and job group; teachers and school staff are a third of the employees covered.
World Bank publicationRead the caseLocal expertise for the OECD team: mapping the institutions that decide on energy and digital networks, convening them in Belgrade and Skopje, and reviewing the country diagnostics.
Responses from small and medium-sized firms in the six Western Balkan economies, on digital tools, greening measures and environmental tracking among other things, cross-tabulated by size, sector, age and export intensity, with a dashboard for the OECD team.
OECD publicationNo published source measures this market, so we built it from primary records: a census of six years of public contracts and tender files, the filed accounts of the supplier base and an object-by-object model of commercial demand. It was sized from the demand and the supply side independently and forecast to 2032 in a model the client can adjust.
The SME sector overviews for seven economies and the regional chapter, built on a harmonised set of size-class statistics, trade by enterprise characteristics and price deflators for 2021 to 2024.
OECD publicationTen 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.
Export and employment series for the six economies, an employer survey and eighteen interviews, written with ICT Hub. A finding was kept only where two sources agreed.
Regional Cooperation Council publicationA 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.
Ownership is traced through court and business registers to the ultimate owners, three years of statutory accounts are set on one definition of profit, and every entry is logged with its source.
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.
Integrated models rebuild a target’s audited accounts into service lines, volumes, prices and staff. They value it on discounted cash flows checked against regional deal multiples, and test each improvement or add-on as its own business case under three scenarios.
A review of the draft assessments for Serbia and Montenegro against the evidence, including the human capital chapter for Montenegro: work-based learning, the Youth Guarantee, skills intelligence and adult learning. Figures were checked through interviews with the institutions that run the programmes.
A statistical annex of about 190 figures benchmarks the system internationally and hospital by hospital. Analysis of millions of patient-level insurance records traces which patients and services drive spending, in a hospital and in primary care.
Built from the filed accounts of every private institution, official enrolment by field and source of financing, listed tuition by programme and data on graduate outcomes.
The filed accounts of every verified operator are matched to enrolment school by school, with demographic projections for the largest cities and a reading of the rules of entry.
We built the quantitative evidence for the review, benchmarking Serbia against the EU, the newer member states and the Western Balkans and comparing its 25 districts. Health accounts, household budget surveys and insurance fund data were brought into one set of figures, which we updated with 2023 data in 2025.
World Bank publicationA database of financing flows for development in constant euros from 2010, from tax revenue and public debt to EU and lender funds, foreign investment, remittances and credit, and a tagging of every programme of the Republic budget by economic group against EU reform areas, negotiating clusters and SDG targets.
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.
OECD publicationEx-ante economic and financial analysis of the activity clusters of a local governance programme: costs, benefits valued from local data, and the point at which each activity pays back.
We assembled and checked the Serbian inputs for a costing model of cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes: population projections, labour and output data, risk factors and unit costs from national institutions.
Review of draft chapters of the assessment and structured feedback from interviews with experts outside government, among other things on producer support, market information and the farm advisory service.
Final accounts of thirty local governments, from the largest cities to the poorest municipalities, digitised and checked line by line and coded by function and economic classification, with plan set against execution.
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.
Interviews and a survey in fourteen local governments on how internal audit is understood and used by managers, with recommendations for strengthening it.
A wage-bill diagnostic and a job-level model of the pay law, built on payroll and pension-insurance registers, which ministry staff were trained to run.
A database of jobs, qualifications and pay for more than 600,000 employees in general government and public enterprises, used to place each job in the grades of the new pay law and to redesign the scale so that pay rises more with expertise.
A county-level database of teachers, pupils, pay and income separates the wage bill into pupil numbers, staff per pupil and relative pay, and maps EU funds for education county by county.
Economic analysis of employment in the public sector and of the system that sets its pay, set against international practice.
Review of the analysis and drafts of the World Bank’s functional review of how Serbia’s school system is organised, staffed and funded, with comments drawn on knowledge of the public sector and its pay.
The link between the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Public Administration in fiscal consolidation and the rightsizing of the public sector: review of the functional analyses of the health and education systems, co-authorship of the government’s analysis of public administration, and the dialogue with the World Bank and the IMF.
At CEVES, 2012–2025
Projects from Nemanja Šormaz’s years at CEVES, a Belgrade think-and-do tank, where he was an analyst and then, from 2014 to 2025, executive director. Each shows his role and the years he took part.
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.
An index of SME competitiveness with 75 indicators in nine pillars, representative by district, sector and firm size, built from an annual survey of about 1,500 firms and the accounts of more than 20,000 companies, and published as an open online portal. It grew out of the research and monitoring for a five-year programme for small and mid-sized firms in agri-food and in equipment and machinery, with digital and green themes across both, which began with a baseline survey of 898 firms, sector analyses and a map of support for SMEs. He led its public presentation at the Chamber of Commerce of Serbia.
SME Compass portalA platform with its own brand and website for Serbia’s domestic export champions: small and mid-sized firms that export more than a million euros a year, chosen on growth, size, sophistication and ethics from the accounts of some 17,700 companies. Each year it brought them together at an exhibition and conference in a regional technology park, in Kragujevac, Niš and Čačak; some 150 conversations with the firms became policy initiatives whose progress was assessed in public every year.
SME100 websiteThe economic pillar of a national civil-society platform on the Sustainable Development Goals, which carried the SME100 agenda to government: advocacy for some twenty-five initiatives, from the investment tax credit to funding for dual education, and a national conference on skills.
Competitiveness-policy diagnostics for the six Western Balkan economies, each with a review of how firms digitalise, and a project that set out how state-aid data could be published as open data, developed with the government’s e-government office.
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.
Two rounds of an employer survey on dual vocational education, with host firms, in-company instructors and the former students they hired, and later a dialogue with leading exporting SMEs whose proposals included support for dual education, tracked each year against government action.
A diagnostic of industry’s readiness for the European Green Deal, run as a pilot for the region: rules and incentives compared with the EU’s circular economy agenda, gaps ranked by the risk they pose to exports, and the food chain set against the Farm to Fork strategy. It was followed by guides for small firms on green finance and EU supply-chain rules, regional workshops and a summer school on the green and digital transition.
A sector diagnosis and a representative survey of more than 400 agri-food firms on markets, technology, finance and constraints, repeated a year later.
A national study of labour and skills needs for the economic migration strategy, built on labour force survey microdata, a sector employment forecast, and interviews and focus groups with about eighty firms.
Four annual rounds compared supported and unsupported firms through surveys of 230 to 300 companies and interviews with partners. A closing evaluation traced what had changed in the sector and why.
What a transition of the coal sector means for output, jobs and trade, nationally and in the places that depend on it, traced through input-output and local income models under different closure paths.
Coordination of the civil-society working group on public internal financial control, a paper on financial management and control in public bodies, and a method for testing whether budgets fund the reforms the government has promised.
Analysis of two editions of the regional business opinion survey of firms in the six Western Balkan economies, including the chapters on innovation and technology and what firms say about skills, training and hiring.
Analyses of Serbian firms from the accounts of every reporting company over many years, asking which firms grow and why and how many of the larger domestic firms started small, and in 2020 a study for a development bank on reaching the small firms the pandemic hit hardest.
A quantified, illustrative development plan for Serbia to 2030, set against how the EU and Ireland plan their development and against the reforms the EU actually asks of Serbia, to show what EU-aligned policies can and cannot deliver for citizens.
Models of what a circular economy would mean for value added and jobs in food waste, electronic waste and plastic packaging, as groundwork for a national strategy.
The starting point against which a programme of regulatory and inspection reform and SME access to finance would be judged: a face-to-face survey of 800 small and mid-sized firms, interviews with 110 inspectors and eight focus groups with citizens, combined into one composite index, also computed by municipality.
An independent baseline review of Serbia’s human development, environmental and institutional challenges, mapped to the Sustainable Development Goals, as groundwork for a society-wide dialogue platform on the goals.
Value-chain studies of four manufacturing sectors in depth and eight more by desk review, built on more than a hundred company interviews, as the analytical base for industrial policy.
A value-chain analysis of food and drink as a base for industrial policy, and a baseline of fruit and vegetable exporters that matched customs and registry data for every exporter and interviewed more than a hundred firms.
An index that ranks all 114 tradable sectors of Serbia’s economy by their development potential on more than a hundred indicators, from the accounts of some 80,000 firms and trade in more than a thousand products, followed by regular reviews of how the key sectors export.
CEVES publicationOne of the first analyses of Serbian business built on the accounts of every operating firm, some 68,000 of them, and interviews with more than a thousand companies: tradable sectors ranked on competitiveness by firm size, industry and region, and business profiles of Serbia’s regions.
Regional business profiles, CEVESWhich small and mid-sized firms grow, and whether banks see them: the accounts of every regularly reporting firm over eight years, interviews with eleven banks holding most of the market, and round tables with banks and the central bank on what could change.
Engagements before April 2025 were carried out by Nemanja Šormaz as an independent consultant or in government. Private clients are not named.
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Company profile, PDF · Belgrade, Serbia