According to the American CIA, Bosnia and Herzegovina currently has a population of over 3.7 million, or about 200,000 more than in 2013, when the last census was conducted.
Such information was published on the official CIA website, in a section called the World Factbook, the content of which was revised on August 13, during the administration of Donald Trump, who appointed his loyalist John Ratcliffe to head the agency.
According to this data, based on an estimate from 2024, 3,798,671 people live in BiH. How the CIA arrived at this number is unclear, since demographers’ estimates indicate that hundreds of thousands of people have left the country since 2013, due to political instability and the poor economic situation, so the actual population is believed to be no more than 2.9 million.
The CIA did not state the share of individual national groups in the total population, but instead referred to the results of the 2013 census, when Bosniaks were 50.1 percent, Serbs 30.8 percent, and Croats 15.4 percent.
The same percentages were used for religious affiliation – Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic communities. The CIA analyst’s observations about the historical name of Bosnia and Herzegovina are also interesting. They state that the greater part of the country, i.e. its north, got its name from the river Bosnia, while the “smaller southern part” got its name from the “old Serbian word” herceg, which means duke.
The golden lily is listed as the national symbol. Among other things, the CIA dealt with data on alcohol consumption in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is what the estimates from 2019 state, according to which each resident of Bosnia and Herzegovina drinks an average of 5.46 liters of pure alcohol through various drinks, with beer leading the way.
