Bosnia’s First Voluntary Pension Funds Can Start Operating in Mid-2009 - Media

The Serb Republic is one of the two autonomous parts forming war-divided Bosnia, and the other is the Muslim-Croat Federation. The two parts have separate pension systems and do not have voluntary pension funds.

The main drawbacks for the Serb Republic’s pension reform are the constant growth in the number of pensioners with respect to the number of employed people and the slowdown in economic growth, daily newspaper Nezavisne Novine quoted the head of the Serb Republic’s working group for pension reform, Bozana Sljivar, as saying.

No data were available about the number of pensioners and the amount of the monthly pension in the Serb Republic. In the Muslim-Croat Federation, the average monthly pension was 348.63 marka ($230/179 euro) in September, when a total of 339,652 pensions were paid.

The Serb Republic’s population is some 1.5 million, while that of the Federation is some 2.3 million.

(1 euro = 1.95583 Bosnian marka)