June 3 (SeeNews) - The share of dinar-denominated loans extended by Serbian banks in the first quarter of 2019 fell to 35.6% of total loans, from 37.7% in the like period of the prior year, Serbia's central bank said.
The share of dinar-denominated deposits of households in the first quarter rose by 1.5 percentage points year-on-year to 69.9%, NBS said in a quarterly report on Friday.
The Serbian banks extended local currency-denominated loans worth 327.4 billion dinars ($3.1 billion/2.8 billion euro) in the January-March period, up 34 billion dinars on the year.
The total value of local currency-denominated loans accounted for 33.3% at the end of the first quarter, up from 32.5% twelve months earlier.
At the end of the first quarter, the total value of household and corporate deposits in Serbia's banking system amounted to 2.291 trillion dinars, up by 294 billion dinars on the previous quarter. The dinar-denominated deposits accounted for 30.5% of the total at the end of March, up from 29.9% in March 2018.
In 2012, the Serbian government and NBS adopted a strategy for the "dinarisation" of the country's economy that aims to achieve a satisfactory level of the use of the dinar in the financial system, in order to improve the country’s financial stability, lessen the risk of exchange rate volatility and reinforce the effectiveness of monetary policy.
(1 euro = 117.802 dinars)