Abstract:
After eight years of the United Nations (UN) administration, Kosovo again is returned to the international centre of attention - this time about her future political status. The document presented by the UN Special Envoy for Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, proposed an ambiguous status settlement that is portrayed and understood as a supervised independence. Whatever expectations from political perspective will be, that is of secondary importance for this paper - the aim is in Kosovo's aggregate uncertainty about her economic sustainability, namely to investigate the relationship between fragile institutions, poor governance and weak economic performance. With a foreign aid since the second half of 1999 amounting to €22 billion, Kosovo still has massive unemployment and widespread poverty. How the UN's largest experiment ever undertaken, involving considerable resources and long time, left the economy in such a poor state?