Extreme Poverty in Bosnia and Herzegovina: 1800 to Today (and Tomorrow)

To understand the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina is to track the slow, steady recession of scarcity. Behind these percentages lie millions of individual lives once constrained by the most basic survival requirements. Data points transform human experience into a legible map, tracing the movement of an entire society away from the brink of extreme deprivation. While numbers can never fully capture the texture of a day, they provide the essential framework to measure the progress of a nation’s collective struggle against the limitations imposed by absolute poverty.

In the 1800s estimate 45, nearly half of the population lived below the international extreme poverty line. Through the following centuries, this share shifted downward with persistent regularity. By the 1900s estimate 25, the figure had fallen significantly, continuing a trajectory that accelerated through the mid-twentieth century. In the 2020s, extreme poverty in Bosnia and Herzegovina stands at 0.5 %, ranking #29 of 157 countries. Projections suggest this decline will eventually stabilize, with the 2060s projection 0.2 remaining the anticipated baseline through the 2100s projection 0.2.

If you were born in the 1800s estimate 45, the mathematical probability of living in extreme poverty was starkly different than for a citizen born today. A child entering the world in the 1950s 12 inherited a landscape where the share of people living below the international extreme poverty line had already diminished by more than half since the turn of the century. Today, that risk has been reduced to a fraction of its historical peak. Use our interactive tools to compute your own parallel lives among those ever born.