Introduction to Cunning Pejo's (Comical Figure from Macedonian Folk Narrations, Trans.) Economy: IMF Announces a Worse Year and Blackest Prognoses (Subhead) Macedonia in Difficult Situation (Globus (28.04.200)‪)‬

One of these days we could hear a sentence from the popular film in many continuations named "Difficult Situation" in which the main protagonist is the director of a Socialist enterprise--Shojic. At a certain moment he gathers the other directors of the company and says--"Comrades, there is a recession in the world. America us shaking, the Japanese economy is cradling as a small boat in the middle of an ocean, and to be honest, the crisis is felt in our enterprise as well"--this is a conclusion in a film made back in 1988. It seems that our Government is in this film. When everybody warned that we would hardly have a positive growth, some people mentioned the growth of 5 percent (the Prime Minister) and the Vice Prime Minister--Godfather Stavrevski was more "modest" and stood at 4 percent, which was accepted as a relevant indicator that we are the only ones with good times or at least that we are not in great difficulty as is the case "with our neighbors and at large". Those who spoke about the enormous expectations of the Government from this smashed economy were proclaimed to be a part of the "SDSM manufacture" (Stavrevski). The crisis in the world will be longer and more difficult than first believed, the IMF warns in the recently published analysis. The rates of the growth in the world will be minus 1.3 percent, and not before next year they will be positive and only by 1.9 percent. As a comparison, the average world rate of the economy growth was 3.2 percent last year.