The people of Bosnia must be among the gloomiest in Europe. Polls show that two-thirds of the young want to emigrate; three-quarters think that the economy is going downhill; politicians are widely considered to be corrupt; and political apathy is at an all-time high. Some 20% of Bosnians are below the poverty line, and another 30% are only just above. The official unemployment rate is running at almost 40%. And yet for all the surface gloom, the underlying picture is surprisingly good. Walk around Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, or Banja Luka, capital of the Serb republic, and the streets are bustling. One reason, according to Dirk Reinermann, the World Bank's representative in Sarajevo, is that, by the Bank's reckoning, only 16% of Bosnians have no work at all. Mr Reinermann adds that he knows of no other post-war country where GDP has recovered to 80% of what it was before the war within eight years. Most infrastructure has been rebuilt. And only 400,000 of the 2.2m-odd refugees and displaced people (out of a total population of 4m) are said to be still waiting to go home.
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