Bosnia And Herzegovina Business Commercial Information Tourism Investment

The collapse of the internal Yugoslav market at the beginning of the 1990s placed the Bosnian economy in serious difficulty, especially as it relied heavily on the sale of its agricultural produce and mineral ores to the rest of the Yugoslav federation. The main agricultural products are tobacco and fruit; livestock rearing is also important. There are extensive mineral resources, particularly of copper, lead, zinc and gold, plus iron ore and lignite coal. The civil war that broke out in 1992 then brought the economy to a virtual standstill. Reconstruction was backed by international aid of US$5 billion. Although the division of the economy between two jurisdictions has made economic policy-making difficult, the Bosnian economy as a whole recorded exceptional growth during the 1990s (at some stages, exceeding 30 per cent annually). A central bank has been set up and a common currency, Konvertibilna Marka (fixed in value to the Euro), successfully introduced.
Initially, most of the post-war international aid was directed to the Muslim-Croat region. The Republika Srpska managed to get much of its industrial sector working again but relied heavily on the support of Yugoslavia. The war between NATO and Yugoslavia in the late 1990s thus set the Bosnian Serb economy back once again. Since then, the central government has received a series of loans, totalling approximately US$250 million, from the IMF. Bosnia has begun a slow transformation to a market economy. The government is hoping that opening up the economy will attract both inward investment and, equally important, the return of the country�s skilled and professional workforce � most of whom have been living in exile since the war.

Bosnia And Herzegovina

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