Tenth Sarajevo Business Forum will take place from April 17th to April 19thand Bosna Bank International (BBI), in cooperation with its shareholders (Islamic Development Bank, Dubai Islamic Bank and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank) and other international partners, is the organizer of the annual International Business and Investment Conference – Sarajevo Business Forum (SBF). The Conference was initially organized in 2010 and since then, has been held every year. The conference has been positioned as one of the most important business and investment events for Southeastern Europe.
SBF is connecting institutional and private investors and businessmen from all over the world with businessmen and project owners from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. It represents a platform for business networking and exploration of investment and business opportunities in the Southeast Europe region with the sole objective to foster its economic development.
At 9th Sarajevo Business Forum, the leading business and investment conference in the Southeastern Europe, recorded the biggest numbers so far in all of its program and organizational segments, it was said at the closing ceremony.
The 9th SBF hosted 1800 participants from 50 countries around the world, 250 projects were presented and 365 B2B meetings were held. This year, a record number of journalists reported from the conference which was attended by 371 accredited media representatives, up by 15% compared to the last year.
Southeast Europe (SEE) has undergone a major economic transition over the past 25 years, transforming from a socialist to a market-based economy. The transition has however been particularly uneven and more complicated than in the rest of Emerging Europe due to the turbulent times during the war in the 1990s. Afterwards, the period up to global economic crisis was in most cases dynamic, in which SEE economies recovered and reached the pre-war levels of GDP. Global economic crisis has negatively affected inflow of foreign direct investments. Furthermore, lower demand from the most important trade partners in the EU, negatively affected the level of exports.
The economy of Southeast Europe (SEE) grew faster in 2015 than in the previous four years due to better EU economic conditions and the decreased effects of the international financial crisis. Most of the SEE countries are expected to maintain solid, largely domestic-demand-driven growth in 2016 according to the IMF. Currently, Slovenia and Croatia are the strongest of the SEE economies, with GDP/Capita far higher than those of its neighbors (Figure 1). Slovenia and Croatia are also the only current European Union (EU) member countries in the region, attributing to some of their success. Still they were also the wealthiest regions in the former SFRY throughout the history, which rendered them better equipped to overcome some of the economic issues caused by the collapse of the country.
