Yugoslav Space: Twenty Years of Transition

Since the mid-1990s, Yugoslavia, a once relatively prosperous region of Eastern Europe, has slowly started to move on through several separate and different entities. Although they belonged to the same system, evidence of inherent discrepancies within the regional parts was difficult to ignore even during the heights of the Yugoslav self-management economy. The political independence paved the way for new/changed economic policies to be created but the implementation was burdensome, to a lesser or higher degree, due to different / changing local and international circumstances, both political and economic. Firstly, this paper aims at presenting the starting position of new economies, followed by surveying the economic and developmental paths taken by the independent states since the resolution of Yugoslavia in 1991. We shall investigate the results of the transition that span from extremely successful (a member of the Euro zone) to moderate and poor results (some of the poorest countries in Europe). The analysis supports conclusions that, regardless of the speed of liberalization and privatization, different transition outcomes may have been in the short run influenced by the initial conditions, but in the long run, the most important factors have been macroeconomic policy, institutional and regulatory reforms.