Small and medium entreprises (SMEs) play a significant role in economic development of both advanced and developing countries. Some earlier research showed that taxation and compliance costs have a significant effect on economic growth, development and performance of the business sector. For this reason, our research focuses on tax compliance costs imposed on the SMEs in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), which is a transition and post-conflict country with a complex tax system structure. This complexity is particularly highlighted in the direct taxation system, hence the focus of this research is on corporate income tax (CIT) compliance costs. Our methodology is based on simulation of tax complience costs between different entities in BiH – Federation of B&H (FB&H) and the Republika Srpska (RS). Our simulation of the CIT return of a company „X“ in line with the entity law suggests that the effective tax burden is higher in RS than in FB&H entity. This result has an important policy implication for the fiscal authorities in B&H, as very often public discourse goes in the oposite direction to our finding.

Abstract Over the last few decades, many countries in the world have been struggling with high indebtedness. This has been especially emphasized in periods of crisis, and this was not an exception during the last global economic crisis in 2009. The advent of the crisis has further increased the need for borrowing. Increasing indebtedness after the crisis was also characteristic of BiH economy, the country in our research focus, which had an increase of public external debt by over 100% over the last two decades. The paper focuses on the external indebtedness of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) over the period 2004-2017. The empirical part relies on dynamic modelling - Vector Autoregression Model, which is used to explore total external indebtedness. The empirical investigation implies that foreign-trade exchange deficits have had the greatest impact on rising indebtedness in BiH, while movements in EURIBOR interest rates have little influence in explaining this variability. The empirical investigation implies that macroeconomic policy in BiH, if it wants to keep the external debt under control over the longer time horizon, does need to focus on deficits in its foreign exchange more. One of inevitable priorities is to work on supporting production based of export from this economy.

In this paper we report results from an online study conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (May 2020). The study examined a range of social and behavioural responses by youth from different ethnic backgrounds and across 63 cities (N = 569). More specifically, the study focused on investigating the relationship between threat perceptions, public health behaviours, stress and social cohesion. As expected, results indicate that higher perceptions of threat were related to higher compliance to safety and health measures despite extremely extremely low levels of political trust. Surprisingly, participants reported relatively low levels of stress despite high social isolation and physical restrictions. These results could partially be explained by an increased level of family interactions. Furthermore, participants reported relatively high levels of social cohesion and common-ingroup identification in a usually segregated and conflict-ridden context.