Posted: 16.01.2025 19:15:00

Belarusians feel confident about economic development in next five years, poll suggests

More than 73% of Belarusians believe that the economic situation in the country will remain the same or become even better in five years – as noted by Irina Lashuk, the Head of the Department of Economic Sociology and Psychology of Entrepreneurship, Head of the Belarusian State Economic University’s Centre for Social and Humanitarian Studies, when announcing data of the sociological survey, BelTA reports

Respondents were asked how they think the economic situation in the country will change in five years. 73.1 percent of those surveyed believe it will remain the same or improve, 2.4 percent think it will get a little worse, while 1.3 percent believe it will deteriorate significantly.

Infographic by BelTA

“This suggests that Belarusians perceive the country’s economy as quite stable. They are confident in the development of the economy,” Ms. Lashuk emphasised. “Objective indicators of economic development are convincing for forming the opinion of citizens. They are guided by objective economic indicators and draw their own conclusions, which shows their confidence in the future.”

23.2 percent of those polled found it difficult to answer.

“These are people who are not very familiar with these objective indicators, they are not very interested in them. In general, the fact that people do not think about how the economy will develop is also a positive moment. Because if everything is fine, why think about it? This shows that there is no crisis,” the expert added.

In December 2024, a cross country opinion survey was conducted by Belarus and Serbia. In Serbia, the public opinion poll was organised by the Institute for International Politics and Economics with the involvement of House of Win, an independent research centre. In Belarus, the survey was conducted by the Centre for Social and Humanitarian Studies of the Belarusian State Economic University (BSEU) via door-to-door interviews (covering 1,500 respondents). The main goal was to identify the peculiarities of mutual perception of Belarusians and Serbs, to determine the most promising areas of co-operation and development of friendly relations between the two countries. Taking into account the coincidence of the time of the social research with the election campaign in Belarus, a separate block of questions in the Belarusian part of the study concerned citizens’ assessment of the socio-political situation and citizens’ electoral priorities.