While Europe’s top economies like Germany and the United Kingdom, and Visegrad countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic, created serious stimulus packages that are a sizable portion of their GDP, Macedonia is intervening with one of the lowest packages in the continent.

The SDSM led Government dragged its feet in even putting together a stimulus package, and wasted time on a now widely ridiculed idea to cut public sector spending instead. When it finally prepared a program that would reimburse companies that have a serious drop in revenue for a portion of their salary spending, the stimulus amounts to just 0,2 percent of GDP.

That is worst in Europe, setting aside Belarus, which has taken an approach that nothing serious is going on anyway. Germany and the United Kingdom have stimulus worth 30,6 and 24,6 percent of their GDP respectively. Hungary, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic are in or just below 20 percent. In the Balkans, countries range from Croatia with 11 percent of GDP set aside for stimulus, down to Albania with 1,3 percent, but nobody is taking such a carefree approach to the crisis as Macedonia, reported the Hungarian Szazadveg Foundation, based on data collected from the IMF and the World Bank.