Vol. 7, 2022

Other topics

POPULATION POLICY MEASURES IN SERBIA UNTIL 2020

Christos Alexopoulos, Milena Despotovic, Milena Zlatanovic, Marija Mikic Mladenovic, Ivan Milojevic, Marko Jovanovic

Pages: 67–71

DOI: 10.37392/RapProc.2022.16

In the past five years, population policy in Serbia has dealt with declining birth rates and strategies to raise them because current trends indicate that birth rates will not increase significantly, which will further contribute to a significant decline in population. Objectives: The aim of this paper is to present an overview of measures to prevent falling birth rates in the Republic of Serbia, as well as their effects. Materials and methods: This paper belongs to the group of review papers. Various databases are reviewed, selected references are analyzed, systematized and presented in this paper. Results: The most important measures of population policy in Serbia are parental allowance and maternity allowance. Like the parental allowance, the salary compensation for mothers is defined by the Law on Financial Support to Families with Children. Families whose monthly income for the last three months does not exceed the established threshold are entitled to child allowance. In 2020, the Republic Health Insurance Fund enabled insured women up to the age of 43, who are being treated for infertility, to be entitled to an unlimited number of attempts at biomedically assisted artificial insemination. The state has also adopted a Strategy for Encouraging Birth. Statistical data show that a slight increase in the fertility rate was observed in the previous decade (1.43 in 2013; 1.46 in 2016; 1.49 in 2018, and 1.52 in 2019). Conclusion: It is still early to talk about the effects of the measures, given that some of them have only recently been introduced and that it is necessary to pass a certain period of time in order to see the results. The historical context, economic and social factors, but also the global pandemic of the SARS-COV-2 virus should be taken into account. In order for population policy measures to yield better results in the future, work needs to be done to strengthen the framework for their implementation.
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