CBBH Representatives at the Meeting of Experts within the Fiscal Governance Strengthening Programme

The third meeting of experts within the Strengthening Fiscal Governance Programme, mostly financed by the EU Fund for Strengthening Fiscal Governance in the Western Balkans was held in Skopje on 24 and 25 September 2026 in the organization of the World Bank. Chief economist, Belma Čolaković,Ph.D. with a World Bank expert, presented the results of the technical mission in Sarajevo in June, related to the assessment of productivity at the level of companies and industries in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and indicated further activities of the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CBBH), related to this project. As she stated, there is no detailed analysis of productivity at the level of companies and industries for the total economic space in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There is also no serious analysis at the Entity level. Consequently, there is a significant risk of inadequately calibrated economic policies; it is impossible to make a detailed assessment of the effects of the introduction of CBAM; the risks and effects of climate change are highly arbitrary; projections are based on assumptions related to the overall productivity and productivity of labour and capital; the estimation of the equilibrium exchange rate, which is also one of the obligations of countries in the EU integration process, will not be accurate in the segment of internal balances; and incomplete information on the average profile of bank clients by industry implies incomplete sets of information to the central bank and regulators, which can make it difficult to assess the strength of the transmission mechanism and monitor systemic risks.

The Central Bank has undertaken activities to develop a model for assessing productivity at the level of companies and industries based on the data on a sample of companies, which were available to us. The activities were undertaken within the World Bank Technical Assistance Programme, as an extension of the macroeconomic projection model already used by the CBBH, including the one developed through the Strengthening Fiscal Governance programme. Our goal is to continue to produce the assessment at the annual level, and to use it to assess the effects of policies. All the data on companies would be anonymized by data owners, the Entity agencies that are responsible for collecting balance sheet and other data of companies in BH. The CBBH would neither know the name of the company, nor publish data on individual companies, nor use them for commercial purposes. We would also share the estimates with the Entity governments, in the format specified through the Memorandum of Understanding, so that the relevant ministries could develop and adjust economic policies, and monitor the effects of their implementation.

The CBBH plans to publish current productivity estimates, as well as indications of the current reasons for the relatively low productivity of the domestic industry, based on a sample of companies, in a special report in the near future. Our goal is to present this tool to the general public, so that they can understand the estimates that we will publish in the future. The econometric model is developed, stable, and the next steps towards full dissemination of the findings are the preparation of the Memorandum of Understanding, and the use of full databases of a number of data from official reports submitted by companies to the APIF (Agency for Intermediary, IT and Financial Services), and FIA (Financial Intelligence Agency). The Central Bank expects that it will receive the data with a symbolic fee for anonymization, in a similar format as they were submitted to other local and international institutions, all the more so because it is a project of invaluable importance for the process of the EU integration of the country, which will be useful to the Entity governments for calibrating policies within their competence, and the assessment of which only at the Entity level makes no sense. We believe that the public disclosure of information on productivity by activities will be of invaluable benefit to the companies themselves, as well as to potential foreign investors. The productivity assessment of companies and industries in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a pilot project, and several countries included in the Strengthening Fiscal Governance programme have already expressed interest in replicating the same methodology and approach in their countries.

During the regular session, the Head of the Section in charge of macroeconomic projections and nowcasts of key macroeconomic variables, Elma Hasanović, MSc, presented the medium-term projections of the CBBH according to various models developed and used by the CBBH. She also commented on the preliminary indications of expectations related to possible revisions in the forthcoming, autumn round of medium-term macroeconomic projections.