Comments by "Vaska Tumir" (@vaska1999) on "Why the Balkans Are So Poor" video.

  1. These days, more and more Americans are retiring to the Balkans. This, at least, is the impression one gets from the multitude of videos by Americans and Canadians who've done so.
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  2. Except it happens to be true.
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  3. Imperialism, baby. It takes a country centuries to recover from its predations. Imperialism, both Turkish/Ottoman and Autro-Hungarian, not forgetting the German imperialism of WW2. The test case is present-day Croatia. Unlike Serbia, Northern Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia didn't experience the horrors and the economic drain of Ottoman colonialism, was then spared by the Nazis as a Nazi ally, and has been receiving EU subsidies as long as Slovenia has. Croatia did however experience Austro-Hungarian imperialism, from which it evidently still hasn't recovered as it's economically in a worse state than Serbia, a country that most recently suffered both 10 years of economic sanctions and 78 days of NATO bombing! With a population just over half the size of its immediate neighbour to the east, and despite the economic advantages of its (one assumes lucrative) tourist industry and the help it gets from the EU, Croatia's international debt burden is roughly 30% higher than Serbia's for an equivalent standard of living.
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