After the Pandemic: Perils and Promise for Western Balkans

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The reported number of COVID-19 cases in the region ranges from several hundreds in Montenegro and Albania to more than 1,000 in North Macedonia and more than 5,000 in Serbia, the country hardest hit by the virus.

Yet the true scale of the crisis in the region is difficult to estimate for political and practical reasons.

For one thing, there is little transparency. Fearing panic-induced instability, Western Balkan governments that have long failed to tackle perceptions of political opacity are withholding information on the capacity of health services and numbers of ventilators.

A shortage of testing kits also makes it hard to gauge the full extent of infections, with Western Balkan states at a critical disadvantage compared with their EU neighbours in tackling the "silent enemy".

Serbia, with a population of around seven million, has almost 3,400 testing kits per million people, according to Worldometer data. Croatia and Slovenia have around 4,900 and 18,000, respectively, with populations of around four million and two million.

A Bosnian man smokes a cigarette with his face mask pulled down in a tavern in Sarajevo. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR

The stress on health systems has revealed in no ambiguous terms the financial vulnerabilities of countries in the Western Balkans and the need for EU fiscal intervention.

The EU has delivered. Prompted by MEPs to include the Western Balkans in its common European response and keen to maintain order in its geopolitical sphere, the EU has mobilised a crisis relief package to...

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