Serbia Capital Markets Technical Assistance - Municipal Bond Development

Country/Locality Serbia
Overall project value (EUR)
 24,400
Name of client
 Ministry of Finance, Serbia
Origin of funding
 World Bank
Starting date 05/2009
Ending date 06/2009
Partner -
Detailed description of project
 The World Bank project on “Serbia Capital Markets Technical Assistance - Municipal Bond Development” aimed to provide assistance to the Ministry of Finance working group on municipal bond issuance. Among other technical assistance and capacity development tasks this project identified the gaps in financial management and formulated recommendations on accurate disclosure practices. Responding to the request from the Ministry of Finance this project developed proposals on model disclosure standards of municipal bond issuance.
They are planned to be the bases of the future Ministry of Finance regulations on the content of a model standards, helped the Treasury to modify the rules and procedures for approving the local government loans in the future and also supported the Securities Exchange Commission. The tasks were to specify the essential groups of information primarily for private placement of municipal bonds and to identify the particularities of the local budgets and municipal financial management in this respect.
Type of services provided
 The assessment of present practices focused on the following aspects of information collection:
  • availability of information: whether the accounting system and other municipal information sources could produce the required data;
  • reliability, that is the municipal administration, the fiscal reports and the national statistics are able to provide accurate information;
  • completeness of the information: what is missing, how the information system should be supplemented for meeting the standard requirements and at the same time making benchmarking of municipal bonds possible.
We have defined the content of the proposed indicator or information, explained why it is important and gave a short assessment on what are the problems with this indicator/data in Serbia.
The proposed disclosure standards were formulated by using the best practices worldwide and from the Central-Southern Eastern European countries. In addition we have analyzed the Serbian regulation on local government finances. The assessment of the Serbian practices was based on field visits, data analysis and case studies from two medium size cities.