Poverty Will Stalk Bosnia When This Pandemic Ends

As in the rest of the Balkans, the aftermath of the pandemic will push hundreds of thousands of people into economic misery.

Thousands of Bosnian are lining up every day already, waiting to register at unemployment bureaus, while the full socio-economic impact of the pandemic is yet to come.

The full extent of this catastrophe cannot be properly assessed yet, as the free movement of capital, goods, services and people has still not been restored in Bosnia.

Estimates concerning the likely size of economic and social losses also largely depend on the duration of isolation measures that were imposed on the population.

Numbers paint bleak global picture

A health worker measures the temperature of a man outside a hospital in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR

The situation will certainly not be normalized in the following two or three months, when some of the restrictive measures, varying from country to country, will remain in force, some for at least 12 months.

This is why the economic and social consequences of COVID-19 will also be felt in the long-term.

Even the most optimistic estimates about the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic paint a bleak picture, while the more pessimistic ones indicate a complete disaster.

Initial estimates from March said that even the most advanced European economies, as in France and Germany, were expected to suffer big falls in Gross Domestic Product, GDP, in 2020, of some 6 per cent.

In the first half of April, The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, and the US credit rating agency Fitch Ratings both predicted much bigger drops of 20 to 30 per cent in GDP in both the US and the Eurozone.<...