New, significant membership in professional networks: CBBH is part of the EABCN family

The Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CBBH) has become a member of the Euro Area Business Cycle Network (EABCN). The network currently has twenty-five members (https://eabcn.org/about), and represents a forum for a better understanding of the business cycle of the euro area, through the strengthening of connections in the field of applied economic research between central banks, the academic community and other policy-making institutions. The representative of the CBBH in the Management Board of EABCN, Chief Economist, Belma Čolaković, Ph.D. (https://eabcn.org/researchers-directory/belma-colakovic), attended the regular Annual meeting of the Board, held on November 25, 2025.

EABCN officially started its work in 2002, and organizes some of the most important conferences and training schools in the economic calendar. Conference and education topics are designed around the needs and proposals of members, and represent a step forward compared to regular conferences of member institutions, in the sense that they are more empirically oriented, although they are strongly based on non-economic theory. For researchers from member institutions (exclusively central banks and supranational institutions of special importance for the euro area), attendance at all trainings is free, in a limited number for live attendance, and unlimited for online attendance.

One of the special activities of the EABCN is setting dates of the business cycle of the euro area as a whole (https://eabcn.org/dbc/home), in a comparable way to what the NBER – National Bureau of Economic Research does for the US economy, which is of great analytical importance and policy formulation in the region to which the euro area is the first neighbour. The Euro Area Business Cycle Dating Committee was founded in 2003 by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), on the initiative of one of today's most influential economists in the field of forecasting, business cycle analysis and monetary policy, professor Lucrezia Reichlin. Professor Reichlin is considered a pioneer of rapid assessments in economics, and today's econometric models used by central banks, including the CBBH, rely heavily on her and her colleagues' work on nowcasts.

We are grateful to the members of the Scientific Committee, especially professor Refet S. Gürkaynak, for the proposal to join the EABCN, and to all members for their warm welcome. We look forward to participating in the planned activities and the exchange of information and experiences, which will further strengthen our analytical capacities, both in the field of applied research and in the segment of macroeconomic projections. For our part, we believe that the activities of the CBBH will contribute to a better understanding of the effects of changes in the euro area business cycle on the candidate countries for EU membership.