January 17 (SeeNews) - Serbia plans to borrow 6.8 billion euro ($7.27 billion) this year to finance budget deficit and refinance outstanding debt, finance minister Dusan Vujovic said on Tuesday.
Out of the total sum, 600 million euro will be used to finance budget deficit, Vujovic said on the sidelines of the Euromoney Central and Eastern European Forum in Vienna, according to a statement issued by the finance ministry.
Serbia will issue 3.5 billion euro worth of dinar-denominated securities and 1.6 billion euro in debt instruments denominated in euro this year, as Serbian investors prefer to buy euro-denominated government securities on the domestic market, Vujovic pointed out.
Last year, the government planned to borrow 5 billion dinars, but as the tax revenue came in larger than expected, actual borrowing was 4 billion dinars, Vujovic said.
Treasury bonds contributed 38.109 billion dinars to the total trading turnover of 44.574 billion dinars on the Belgrade bourse in 2016. In the previous year, the trading turnover on the Belgrade bourse totalled 22.429 billion dinars, to which trading in Treasury bonds contributed only 5.323 billion dinars.
Trading in Treasury bonds was a positive factor for the performance of both share indices of the Belgrade Stock Exchange, which posted double-digit gains in 2016, according to the head of strategy and market research department at Eurobank Beograd, Ivan Radovic.
The blue-chip BELEX15 index increased 11.38% last year.
The listing of sovereign bonds and notes was a positive factor as it "brought some media light to the Belex, and stocks became an indirect beneficiary," Radovic told SeeNews in an e-mailed statement last week.
BELEX15 closed at 715.21 on Tuesday, down 0.30% since the beginning of trading in 2017.
($ = 0.93528 euro)