Regional Policy Funds: How Prepared Is Serbia to Access European Union Regional Policy Funs?

Bearing in mind that Serbia is dealing with serious and challenging development issues, especially scarce of financial resources, it is extremely important to establish institutional and legal framework for drawing financial means from European Union regional policy funds. The importance and potential support of these funds for Serbia is visible through the fact that European Union financial capacity for the purposes of the equal regional development is more ten times bigger than Serbian yearly GDP. One of basic prerequisites for stable and continuous social and economic development is equal regional growth of all parts of country and as one of basic European values should contribute to planning and application of development policy. As of 2010 Serbia has 5 statistical regions with strong multilevel disparities. One of the key challenges in the future will be to find the way to mitigate differences and European Union regional funds will play inevitable roll. The authors are trying to identify, to analyze and to emphasize decisive obstacles in drawing and exploiting recourses from regional funds. These obstacles are particularly present in facilitating development of under- and undeveloped areas, old and mainly devastated infrastructure, ecological policy matters and extremely low employment rates.