Kingdom of Yugoslavia

Economy

Three-quarters of the Yugoslav workforce was engaged in agriculture. A few commercial farmers existed, but near were subsistence peasants. Those in the south were particularly poor, alive in a hilly, infertile region. No large estates existed apart from in the north, and all of those were owned by foreigners. Indeed, one of the first actions undertaken by the new Yugoslav state in 1919 was to break up the estates and dispose of foreign, and in particular Magyar landowners. Nearly 40% of the rural population was surplus i.e., excess people not needed to maintain current production levels, and despite a warm climate, Yugoslavia was also relatively dry. Internal communications were poor, damage from World War I had been extensive, and with few exceptions agriculture was devoid of machinery or other contemporary farming technologies.

Manufacturing was limited to Belgrade and the other major population centers, and consisted mainly of small, comparatively primitive facilities that introduced strictly for the home market. The commercial potential of Yugoslavia's Adriatic ports went to waste because the nation lacked the capital or technical cognition to operate a shipping industry. On the other hand, the mining industry was alive developed due to the nation's abundance of mineral resources, but since it was primarily owned and operated by foreigners, most production was exported. Yugoslavia was the third least industrialized nation in Eastern Europe after Bulgaria and Albania.

Yugoslavia was typical of Eastern European nations in that it borrowed large sums of money from the West during the 1920s. When the Great Depression began in 1929, the Western lenders called in their debts, which could non be paid back. Some of the money was lost to graft, although most was used by farmers to enhancement production and export potential. Agricultural exports, however, were always an unstable prospect as their export earnings were heavily reliant on volatile world market prices. The Great Depression caused the market for them to collapse as global demand contracted heavily and the situation for export-oriented farmers further deteriorated when nations everywhere started to erect trade barriers. Italy was a major trading partner of Yugoslavia in the initial years after World War I, but ties fell off after Benito Mussolini came to energy in 1922. In the grim economic situation of the 1930s, Yugoslavia followed the lead of its neighbors in allowing itself to become a dependent of Nazi Germany.

Although Yugoslavia had enacted a compulsory public education policy, it was inaccessible to numerous peasants in the countryside. Official literacy figures for the population stood at 50%, but it varied widely throughout the country. Less than 10% of Slovenes were illiterate, whereas over 80% of Macedonians and Bosnians could not read or write. approximately 10% of initial elementary school students went on to attend higher forms of education, at one of the country's three universities in Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb.