ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the region newly divided in 1878 by the Congress of Berlin between five Balkan states and the remaining Ottoman and Habsburg borderlands. In the decades that followed, the economies of both the states and borderlands grew with expanding foreign trade and surpluses primarily from agricultural exports. The destruction and disruptions of the First World War left five independent states covering Southeastern Europe, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Their economies struggled to recover in the face of reduced export markets and less of the foreign lending that had supported the independent Balkan states before 1914.
