BETTERING BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC-PRIVATE DIALOGUE IN REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA BY PROVIDING BETTER BUSINESS INFORMATION CHANNELS

Project period September 2005 - August 2006
Financed by The Balkan Trust for Democracy
Project budget 36.826 USD

The project is the first business environment watch in Republic of Macedonia, which started its second year of implementation.

The main project purpose is to provide channels for transfer of business information from the government to the business community and general public in order to improve both - the citizen’s engagement with government and the governmental communication with the citizens.

The main project goals are:

- to disseminate information from the government to the general public, aiming to fill in the existing informative gap between them and bettering the government communication with citizens;

- to analyze different government actions and policies, explaining to the general public their economic meaning and likely impact on the business environment;

- to continue working on broadening the rationale public debate on economic and other public policy issues, aiming to improve the citizens’ understanding of government actions and their involvement in the policy and decision making process;

- to advocate higher transparency of the decision and policy making process.

The main project activity is collecting information about and commenting on different government policies, events, reforms and draft regulations, explaining their economic meaning and likely impact on the business environment to the general public.

During the first project year the team has commented 10 draft-laws and 3 already enacted regulations along with a number of public events, reforms and other economic policy related issues, providing independent and free of political prejudices assessment.

All comments and analyses are disseminated as a Monthly Business Environment Monitoring to a list of business associations, NGOs, government bodies, media, and individual businesses. The list already counts more than 1000 recipients and will become bigger in the coming years. The media is interested in the analyses and reprints some of them, thus providing for bigger audience.