Regionalization of Serbia - new proposal for division of Serbia into statistical units waits for Europe's opinion

The map of Serbia divided into regions was finished and sent to European statistical agency "Eurostat" three weeks ago.

That is the third variant that has been submitted to "Eurostat" since the adoption of the Law on regional development. "Eurostat" is to give the opinion whether the suggested division is in accordance with European criteria. The previous two maps were rejected by "Eurostat", so that they have never reached Serbian Government, which should be the next stop of the map accepted by "Eurostat".

According to the people from the Statistics Institute of Serbia, of which task is to draw the borders of the future statistical units, "Eurostat" is expected to give the opinion in few days. If the suggested division gets "green light", it will be forwarded to the Government of Serbia for adoption.

- There are seven regions on the map, as stipulated by the Law. Belgrade, Vojvodina and Kosovo are not disputable, but the proposal that we have sent to "Eurostat" may be rejected because of insufficient number of citizens in the remaining four regions. Namely, at least two of them would not have sufficient number of inhabitants in that case - Nikola Latinović, the Assistant of the CEO of the Statistics Institute, told "Novosti".

According to European standards, future regions must have between 800,000 and 3m inhabitants. There are 3.8m people living in central Serbia, but they are not covering the whole territory equally, so that two regions - eastern and southern, can not meet that criterion.

Latinović points out that the rule that must be respected in the creation of the map is that the borders of 29 existing municipalities and administrative regions can not be changed. Therefore, no matter how the borders are drawn and municipalities grouped, two regions have insuficient number of inhabitants.

Two weeks for comments

In addition to green light from "Eurostat", statistic division of the country must also be accepted by all 25 ministries. Nikola Latinović says that, after the Statistics Institute delivers the map of the region, the ministers will have two weeks to give possible comments on the offered proposal.

(Note: complete text is taken over from newspaper "Novosti" of September 5th, 2009)