[LINK] "'How Did We Become So Poor?'"
May. 28th, 2010 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldOver at IPS News, Vesna Peric Zimonjic writes about how the peoples of the former Yugoslavia are coping with the fact that their economies collapsed so thoroughly, such that GDP per capita and income are still well below 1990 levels.
As Broadberry and Klein note in their 2008 paper "Aggregate and Per Capita GDP in Europe, 1870-2000", Yugoslavia has suffered massively. In 1990, thanks to its long history of integration with western Europe, Yugoslavia was in a relatively enviable place: GDP per capita in Serbia comparable to Poland, Croatia was well ahead of Slovakia and Hungary (31), and Yugoslavia as a whole was reasonably well positioned (27). If Yugoslavia had followed Polish growth trajectories in the 1990s and later, Yugoslavia would have the second-large economy of the new accession states, with Serbians and Vojvodinans enjoying living standards comparable to their Hungarian counterparts and Croatia being right up there not far behind the Czech Republic. Even the country's poorest regions, like Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia, would be substantially advanced. Instead, these countries have fallen far behind, and with the exception of perhaps Croatia I doubt that they'll have the chance to regain their relative positions.
Experts and analysts agree that the region, now comprising the newly independent nations or territories of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro, went through a "painful transition" into market economy.
It began more or less at the time when the 1991-95 wars of disintegration tore the country apart and ended a brand of relaxed socialism that had existed since the end of WW II.
Except for Slovenia, once the most developed part of former Yugoslavia and which became a member of the European Union (EU) in 2004, the economic performances of the rest are dismal when compared to 1989, a benchmark for the region.
Experts say that the processes of privatisation and transition to market economy here differed profoundly from what happened in the former East European nations after the Berlin wall fell in 1989 and that today's poverty is not a sudden event caused by recent global downturn.
"We did not see former cunning communist managers or murky international businesses being engaged in privatisation," economy analyst Misa Brkic told IPS in an interview.
"We had devastating wars, used by local elites to grab power and introduce people close to them into economy, where, as the time went by in the 90s and in this decade, they did not and could not play by market rules."
The wars left more than 120,000 people dead and economic damage worth tens of billions of dollars in devastated factories, companies, state or privately owned real estate, and in production and export losses of the former common market that collapsed.
[. . .]
Croatia and its 4.3 million people reached 69 percent of its 1989 GDP in 2003, while Serbia and its 7.3 million reached the same point only in 2009.
As for Bosnia-Herzegovina with an estimated population of 3.5 million, and its specific post-war construction of two entities, Republic of Srpska, the Serb entity, and Muslim-Croat Federation, things stand definitely worse.
As Broadberry and Klein note in their 2008 paper "Aggregate and Per Capita GDP in Europe, 1870-2000", Yugoslavia has suffered massively. In 1990, thanks to its long history of integration with western Europe, Yugoslavia was in a relatively enviable place: GDP per capita in Serbia comparable to Poland, Croatia was well ahead of Slovakia and Hungary (31), and Yugoslavia as a whole was reasonably well positioned (27). If Yugoslavia had followed Polish growth trajectories in the 1990s and later, Yugoslavia would have the second-large economy of the new accession states, with Serbians and Vojvodinans enjoying living standards comparable to their Hungarian counterparts and Croatia being right up there not far behind the Czech Republic. Even the country's poorest regions, like Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia, would be substantially advanced. Instead, these countries have fallen far behind, and with the exception of perhaps Croatia I doubt that they'll have the chance to regain their relative positions.
