BUILDING FAVORABLE ENVIRONMENT FOR DOING BUSINESS IN MACEDONIA

Business Environment Activity (BEA) is a rule-changing project that supports the creation of a stable macroeconomic environment in Macedonia in which the private sector can operate in an efficient manner with the aim of achieving national development goals, such as faster economic growth, unemployment reduction, increased investment, etc. BEA provides technical assistance in several different fields:

1. It works directly with the government, its ministries and agencies, and private sector businesses and associations, to facilitate effective dialogue between the public and private sector aimed at improving the quality of commercial laws and regulations, and easing their drafting, implementation and compliance. These interventions will increase the (currently weak) influence that the private sector has over the government and contribute to strengthening of the business associations;
2. BEA supports trade facilitation through establishing a “single window” for exports and imports in order to eliminate long licensing procedures and other administrative obstacles to exporters and importers. This will contribute to cost reduction within the foreign trade operations and efficient (timely) delivery of the goods and services;  
3. BEA assists the lightening of the regulatory burden on businesses, and addresses constraints on competitiveness in order to enable companies compete on the domestic and international market and benefit from the trade liberalization;
4. BEA promotes the introduction of good corporate governance practices among Macedonian companies in order to enable their proper functioning, gain transparency of the financial market, improve access to capital and capital markets and increase trust of investors;
5. BEA provides for strengthening the capacity of government and non-government institutions to ensure that the existing and newly created policies, laws and regulations are properly implemented and enforced in a transparent, market-oriented manner;
6.  BEA promotes the establishment of public private partnerships as a new source of private capital that will allow for greater private sector participation in the delivery of public services. The benefits will be seen in project cost savings, better project management and delivery, and increased domestic and foreign investment;
7. BEA assists the strengthening of the Macedonian financial sector through expanding the range of non-bank financial products and capacity building of financial sector supervisors and regulators. This will provide for broadening and deepening of the financial market, improving the access to finance for Macedonian companies, and building secure environment for financial operations;
8. BEA is supporting the labour market reform through introduction of active labour market measures, improvement of employment services and involvement of the private sector in human resource planning and development. Both businesses and workers will benefit from this support since it will enable effective matching of the labour demand and supply.
9. BEA contributes to the enhancement of the capacities of the fully funded pension supervision and promotes the integration of non-bank supervision (insurance, pension insurance and capital market). This will provide for harmonization of the different supervision services and standards, and will contribute to the overall reform of the financial sector.