Disfunctional Bosnia ‘Losing Millions’ Every Year

Bosnia is losing about 340 million euro per year because of its non-efficient government and delays to projects already funded by credits, it was said at a round table in Sarajevo on Wednesday.
 
Lejla Dragnic, from the Centre for Politics and Governance, said 220 million was lost per year in inefficiency while another 120 million was being lost as a result of failures take up available funds.
 
The latter loss was “mainly down to infrastructure projects not being realized on time, even though there were secured credits for them worth millions of marks,” Lejla Draganic told the roundtable organised by the NGO Transparency International.

The price of Bosnia’s continued political deadlock was comparable to the loss of more than half of million average salaries every year, she maintained.
 
Bosnia’s Deputy High Representative, Roderick Moore, said the underlying cause of the stagnation of the country was the absence of a common vision of its future.
 
“It is clear that 13 months after the general elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, frustration has replaced optimism,” Moore said.
 
Bosnia’s six main political parties have failed to agree over the composition of the State Council of Ministers, the country’s highest executive body, primarily over whose should get the posts of prime minister and foreign minister.
 
Moore said foreign investment in Bosnia had dried up because capital would not flow into a politically unstable country where corruption was also a high risk, stressing that ordinary citizens were paying a high price.

The Executive director of Transparency International in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srdjan Blagovcanin, said there was a danger that the legal and institutional system could collapse if urgent steps were not taken to fight the worst cases of corruption.
 
Depressingly, about 80 per cent of young people want to leave the country, according to polls, it was also said at the round table.