Serbia/OER

Overview

Serbia (Serbian: Србија, Srbija), officially the Republic of Serbia (Serbian: Република Србија, Republika Srbija), is a landlocked country located in both Central Europe and Southeastern Europe. Its territory covers the southern part of the Pannonian Plain and central part of the Balkans. Serbia borders Hungary to the north; Romania and Bulgaria to the east; the Republic of Macedonia to the south; and Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro to the west; its border with Albania is disputed. The population of Serbia is around 7,300,000 (2009 estimate, excluding Kosovo). Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, is among the largest cities in Southeastern Europe. Serbia is a member in numerous organisations such as the United Nations, the OSCE, Council of Europe and CEFTA which it presides over in 2010. Serbia is classified as an emerging and developing economy by the International Monetary Fund and an upper-middle income economy by the World Bank. WTO accession is "expected in 2010". Serbia has a high Human Development Index while Freedom House in 2008 listed Serbia as one of few "free" Balkan states. The country is also an EU membership applicant. Serbs form the largest ethnic group, with significant minorities consisting of Hungarians, Bosniaks, Albanians, Roma, Croats, Czechs and Slovaks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Germans, and Chinese. According to the UN assessments, 450,000 to 500,000 Roma live in Serbia, most of whom have been exiled from Kosovo. The northern province of Vojvodina is ethnically and religiously diverse. Refugees and IDPs in Serbia form between 7% and 7.5% of its population – about half a million refugees sought refuge in the country following the series of Yugoslav wars. Serbia has the largest refugee population in Europe. On the other hand, it is estimated that 500,000 people have left Serbia during the 1990s alone - and a significant amount of these people were college graduates. Serbia has the fourth oldest overall population on the planet, mostly due to heavy migration and low level of fertility, which is expected to continue in long terms. In addition, Serbia has among the highest negative growth population rates in the world, ranking 227th out of 233 countries overall. Serbia is divided into 24 districts (excluding Kosovo) plus the City of Belgrade. The districts and the City of Belgrade are further divided into municipalities. Serbia has 2 autonomous provinces: Vojvodina (7 districts, 46 municipalities) and Kosovo and Metohija. Kosovo has declared independence, which Belgrade opposes, and is presently under the administration of the UN. The part of Serbia that is neither in Kosovo nor in Vojvodina is called Central Serbia. Central Serbia is not an administrative division, unlike the two autonomous provinces, and it has no regional government of its own. In English this region is often called "Serbia proper" to denote "the part of the Republic of Serbia not including the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo", as the US Library of Congress puts it. This usage was also employed in Serbo-Croatian during the Yugoslav era (in the form of "uža Srbija", literally: "narrow Serbia"). Its use in English is purely geographical, without any particular political meaning being implied. Vojvodina province is 25% Catholic or Protestant, while Central Serbia and Belgrade regions are over 90% Orthodox Christian. (Kosovo is 90% Muslim.) With a GDP PPP for 2008 estimated at $79.662 billion ($10,792 per capita PPP), the Republic of Serbia is an upper-middle income economy as judged by the World Bank. Foreign Direct Investment in 2006 was $5.85 billion or €4.5 billion - for 2007 iy reached $4.2 Billion while real GDP per capita figures are estimated to have reached $6,781 (April 2009). The GDP growth rate showed increase by 6.3% (2005), 5.8% (2006), reaching 7.5% in 2007 and 8.7% in 2008 as the fastest growing economy in the region. According to Eurostat data, Serbian PPS GDP per capita stood at 37 per cent of the EU average in 2008. The economy has a high unemployment rate of 14% and a unfavourable trade deficit. Apart from its free-trade agreement with the EU as its associate member, Serbia is the only European country outside the former Soviet Union to have free trade agreements with the Russia and, more recently, Belarus. Serbia claims to grow about one-third of the world's raspberries and is a leading frozen fruit exporter.

Further information

For further general information see Wikipedia:Serbia/OER.

Education in Serbia/OER

For a general description of education in Serbia/OER see Education:Serbia/OER.

e-learning

For a description more focussed to e-learning see E-learning:Serbia/OER.

Internet in Serbia/OER

89% of households in Serbia have fixed telephone lines, and the number of cell-phone users surpasses the number of population of Serbia itself by 30%, accounting to 9.6 million users (7,39 million citizens). 46.8% of households have computers, 36.7% use the internet, and 42% have cable TV, which puts the country ahead of certain member states of the EU. Serbia is ranked 59th in the world in terms of Internet usage out of 216 states by the CIA World Factbook. Newest estimates (2009) put Serbia ahead of all Balkan countries save for Croatia in terms of No of Internet users (45% of its population). (1)

References

1. ReVica/VISCED page for Serbia (http://virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/Serbia)

Reports

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