Each record describes something a country built that the indicators do not capture. The source provides the published number; the mechanism is our interpretation.
Scores describe outcomes. These records describe how a country acted, what it needed and what happened. 742 of 742 records include a mechanism. They do not affect scores.
Serbia's Innovation Fund financed 79 joint research and development projects of private small and medium firms with public research organisations across eight calls of its Collaborative Grant Scheme, the eighth call, decided in 2024, funding eight.
The national innovation fund runs competitive calls in which a private SME leads a consortium with a public research organisation, pays part of the budget, and must route at least 15 percent of the grant to the research partner.
Preconditions
An arm's length innovation agency with grant management capacity built under donor projects
Accredited public research institutes and faculties able to contract with firms
SMEs able to co-finance a third or more of an R&D budget
Where else it has been used: Montenegro's Innovation Fund runs a Collaborative Grants programme on the same template.
Limits: The Fund reports on its own programme and publishes no total: 79 is our count of the project entries on its per-cycle pages (14, 9, 13, 12, 11, 6, 6 and 8 projects in cycles one to eight; each page renders every project twice, and the count is of distinct titles). The pages carry no dates, so the year of each cycle is not read there; that the eighth call funded eight projects in 2024 is from the Ministry of Finance CFCU release of 15 August 2024 ('8 under the Collaborative Grant Scheme Program'), and a Fund release of 20 March 2024 reports six joint projects in the call before. The counts are grants awarded, not completed projects or commercial results. The scheme is co-financed by the European Union through IPA and began under World Bank financing, so the delivery is the Fund's but the money is partly external. Annual volume has fallen from 11 to 14 projects a call in the early cycles to six to eight, and the programme page shows the call as closed with no ninth cycle listed on 2026-10-02, so 'operating' rests on the absence of any announced end. The started year is approximate: the first cycle is not dated on the cited page. Each consortium needs only one firm and one public research organisation, and requires firms to co-finance 30 to 40 percent, so 79 projects is a small national volume.
๐ท๐ธSerbiasince 2020operating below its peakbears on Public-private collaboration
Serbia's Government paid a monthly allowance to young people without work experience while employers trained them for nine months under the Moja prva plata programme run by the National Employment Service, which placed 9,237 young people with 5,471 employers in the 2021 cycle and 7,214 with 4,520 employers from the 2023 call in January 2024, but ran no call for 2024 and started no activity under the measure in 2025 against a plan of 10,000 places.
The Government let firms post training positions on a national portal, let young people apply, had employers pick candidates, and paid the trainees directly through a tripartite contract with the National Employment Service, so firms trained at no wage cost.
Preconditions
A national employment service able to sign and monitor thousands of tripartite contracts
Employers short of staff and willing to train, which the programme was designed around
A budget line of about RSD 2 billion per cycle that the Ministry of Finance would renew
Where else it has been used: Close to the youth traineeships run under the EU Youth Guarantee; Serbia's version selects through a single online portal and leaves the choice of candidate to the employer.
Limits: The agency reports on its own programme. The zero is in Table 6 (PDF page 23), measure 5.8, planned 10,000 and realised 0, and section 5.8 (PDF page 41) states that no activities to implement the measure were started in 2025; the report gives no reason. The 2021 figure is from a Government portal release (srbija.gov.rs/vest/595588, 3 December 2021), not at the cited URL, and counts young people employers selected at the start of a cycle, not completions; the 2022 cycle was not read, so 2021 is the highest dated count found, not a demonstrated peak. The 2024 report (Izvestaj o radu NSZ za 2024. godinu, Table 6 and page 45, nsz.gov.rs) gives 7,214 young people at 4,520 employers from the 2023 call, contracted between 1 and 19 January 2024, of whom 4,950 were with 3,892 private employers and 2,264 with 628 public employers, and says no public call for 2024 was carried out; the first cycle in 2020 also reserved 2,648 places for public-sector employers, so the programme was never wholly public-private. The 35 percent of first-cycle participants who signed an employment contract is stated in the 2021 release without a denominator or follow-up period. In 2025 municipalities co-financed 36 placements under a local variant (Table 18 of the 2025 report), which this record does not count. The programme portal (mojaprvaplata.gov.rs) still announces a new cycle of up to 10,000 places with no date, so the halt may be a gap between calls rather than an end; the record documents two years without a national call, not abolition. The state paid the allowance and the employer supplied the training and the workplace, so it is a wage subsidy for trainees as much as a training programme, and some employers may have used it in place of hires they would have made anyway.
Serbia's National Employment Service put 1,613 unemployed people into labour market training (obuke za trziste rada) in 2024, but in 2025 it delivered none of the 1,100 places planned for that year for lack of accredited providers, and only 626 people trained under contracts carried over from the 2023 and 2024 plans.
The public employment service buys short vocational courses for registered unemployed people from a catalogue it procures each year, and since the adult education law only from providers accredited as publicly recognised adult education organisers.
Preconditions
A national catalogue of training matched to local vacancies
Enough accredited private and public training providers in each district
A procurement cycle that closes early enough in the year for courses to run
Where else it has been used: Tying public training money to an accreditation register raises quality on paper; Serbia's 2025 report shows the cost when the register is thinner than the demand.
Limits: The agency reports on itself, in a 127-page PDF in Serbian Cyrillic: Table 6 is on page 23 and the statement that the measure was not realised in 2025 ('dovelo do nerealizacije ove mere u 2025. godini') is on pages 28 to 29, where the agency attributes it to too few training programmes with publicly recognised adult education provider (JPOA) status at the locations needed. The 2024 figure is in the 2024 report (Izvestaj o radu NSZ za 2024. godinu, Table 6, on the same agency page), not at the cited URL. 2024 is the previous year, not a demonstrated peak: the 2019 report gives 1,257. The scale is very small for a country of about 6.6 million: other NSZ measures in the same table (internships, functional basic adult education with 1,157 participants in 2025, employer-requested training with 601) are separate counts and were not added in. The counts are people included, not completions or job outcomes, and cover only the registered unemployed. A one-year procurement and accreditation failure may reverse; the record documents a dated loss, not a permanent end. The started year is approximate: the measure appears in the agency's reports from at least 2010 and the 2009 start is the year the current employment law took effect, not read at the source.
After the state of emergency of 15 March 2020, Serbia's Government presented a EUR 5.1 billion economic package on 31 March that included paying micro, small and medium firms one minimum wage per employee for three months if they cut staff by no more than 10 percent, and on 7 May 2020 the Ministry of Finance paid about RSD 32 billion as the first minimum wage for 1.055 million employees of 232,000 businesses.
The Ministry of Finance paid a flat minimum wage per employee straight into the accounts of every small private employer that opted in through the tax administration's portal, using payroll tax filings as the register, with a staff-retention condition.
Preconditions
Monthly individual payroll tax returns that already listed every employee by employer
A tax administration portal through which firms could opt in without a separate application
Fiscal space from a prior surplus, which the minister cited as what made the payment possible
Where else it has been used: A cruder, faster cousin of short-time work schemes; North Macedonia's 14,500 denar per employee measure of 2020 used the same flat design.
Limits: The page reports the Finance Minister announcing on 6 May that the payment would be made 'tomorrow', so the record rests on a ministerial statement of a payment due the next day, not on a Treasury outturn, and the figures are approximate ('priblizno 32 milijarde dinara'). The package date and the eligibility condition come from a second Government portal release of 31 March 2020 ('Za ublazavanje posledica epidemije na privredu 5,1 milijarda evra', srbija.gov.rs/vest/456168), which also names 15 March as the cut-off for firms that stopped trading; the 37 days are our count between the two releases. The subsidy was nearly universal for private small firms that applied, so it paid many employers who would have kept staff anyway, and the same release says firms also deferred RSD 29.5 billion of taxes and contributions. The page does not give the second and third payments or a final total. The 'condition' that firms not cut staff by more than 10 percent is a rule, and this record does not show whether it was enforced.
๐ท๐ธSerbiasince 2014delivered and closedbears on Disaster preparedness and recovery
After the May 2014 floods evacuated about 32,000 people and flooded the Kolubara open-pit mines that fuel 40 percent of Serbia's generating capacity, the state utility EPS dewatered the Tamnava West mine by the first quarter of 2015 and kept supply at pre-flood levels with no recorded shortages, and the Directorate of Water Management rebuilt or upgraded 71 km of flood protection that by October 2019 covered 24,944 households against a target of 9,000.
The government used an emergency loan to buy power while the state utility pumped out its flooded lignite mines, then redirected the savings into rebuilding river defences to a higher standard.
Preconditions
A vertically integrated state utility able to import power at short notice
An emergency lending window that disburses within months
A water directorate with designs ready for embankment works
Limits: The figures are the World Bank's, in a completion report on an emergency loan it financed and rated; the event figures are in para. 1 (printed page 6), the power and mine results in para. 45 (pages 16 to 17), and the flood protection figures in para. 51 (page 19). Most of the loan bought electricity imports for the 2014 to 2015 winter, so 'no shortages' partly measures money, not preparedness, and the original power target was cut when demand proved lower. The 24,944 households exceeds its target mainly because funds were moved into flood works at restructuring, with a 22-month extension; the target itself was set low. Five substations were procured but never installed for lack of permits, and two meteorological radars were lost to mis-procurement, both before closing. The record is recovery from one event and does not show that warnings or evacuation worked in 2014, when 51 people died.
Serbia's state road company Koridori Srbije built 45.5 km of Corridor X motorway on the E-75 towards North Macedonia and the E-80 Dimitrovgrad bypass towards Bulgaria under a loan approved in July 2009, finishing at a total project cost of EUR316.2 million against an appraisal estimate of EUR318.2 million, but taking about 10 years from approval to full completion against a planned 6.5, with the loan closing in September 2019 instead of December 2015.
A dedicated state motorway company procured large lots under development bank rules, held the cost line by re-bidding failed contracts and drawing an additional loan, and accepted years of delay rather than scope cuts.
Preconditions
A single implementing company for the corridor with procurement and supervision staff
Contingencies in the appraisal estimate large enough to absorb variation orders
Government budget for expropriation, whose absence caused the early delays
Limits: The figures are the World Bank's, in a completion report on a project it financed and rated, written with data from the implementing agency. The two costs are in para. 11 and Table 2 (printed page 8) and para. 54 (page 19); the 10 years against 6.5 and the closing dates are in para. 32 (page 13) and the datasheet (page 2). Staying on budget was helped by a 2016 additional loan of EUR35 million that covered overruns (datasheet and para. 58), and the construction cost alone rose 21 percent over the initial contract prices, so 'on budget' means within an appraisal estimate that carried contingencies, not within contract prices. The Dimitrovgrad bypass contractors were terminated twice and its works finished in November 2019 against an April 2012 contract date (Table 6). The record covers only the World Bank financed sections of a longer corridor co-financed by EIB, EBRD and others, whose cost and schedule are not reported here. Traffic in 2018 was 46 percent of the appraisal forecast on the E-80. The start year is the first works contract (April 2010, Table 6).