Skopje, 18 February 2025 (MIA) - The Government is set to review Tuesday the proposals by retailers and discuss additional measures that could be taken in order to restrict prices of certain products.

Retailers have presented several proposals to the Ministry of Economy and Labor, some related to margin caps while others on reducing prices of basic food products.

SDSM said yesterday that despite promises, the Government's policies have failed. The opposition party has submitted in Parliament motions for law amendments within the set of measures for a better standard of life. The measures include lowering the VAT for electricity from 18 to 5 percent and the VAT for basic food products from 5 to zero percent.

The economic chamber of wholesale and retail traders in food and non-food products, beverages and tobacco said yesterday it has submitted proposals to Government aimed at ensuring effective measures that would cut the prices on certain groups of products. Chamber representative Danica Blazhevska said last week that grocery retailers proposed the prices of only 100 or 200 grocery items be capped. "Now it covers over 1,000 products. This creates problems for us in our daily price controls and in getting better prices from producers and suppliers."

The Ministry of Economy has said the grocers' proposals would be reviewed before the government decided on any price caps on grocery items. "It was agreed at the meeting that the final decision would be made next week," the release said.

In response to the two consumers' grocery store boycotts spurred by the rising cost of living crisis, which were held on Jan. 31 and Feb. 7, the Government had said the Ministry of Economy would draft a plan to set maximum gross profit margins of 10 percent on basic food products. The plan was to include the 73 essential items covered in previous so-called "consumer basket" government price-control measures. The market intervention was to be expanded to detergents, baby formula and other essential non-food products with high profit margins, as well.

The decision was based on a six-month report from the State Market Inspectorate that showed grocers' profit margins reached over 20 percent on basic food products and over 30 percent on personal hygiene products. The report said that importers and distributors had even higher profit margins, some of them as high as 50 percent.

MIA file photo