Competence at Every Level
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Who taxes, who teaches, who polices: a functional guide to which tier of government controls what.
Bosnia and Herzegovina has no single government in any meaningful sense. It has a state layer, two entities, ten cantons within one of those entities, and dozens of municipalities beneath all of them — each tier holding real authority over something that matters to daily life. The confusion is real, but the underlying logic is not random.
Who Runs What
Taxation is split. The state collects indirect taxes — value-added tax and customs duties — through the Indirect Taxation Authority, then distributes the revenue downward by formula. Direct taxes, primarily income and profit taxes, are levied and kept by the entities. The result is that tax policy differs between the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska: rates, exemptions and filing procedures are not the same on both sides of the inter-entity line.
Education sits almost entirely below the state level. In Republika Srpska, the entity runs a unified curriculum. In the Federation, education is a cantonal competence, which means ten cantons run ten separate systems — their own curricula, their own teachers' pay scales, their own textbook procurement. The state has no ministry of education. Where cantons are ethnically mixed, school organisation has sometimes produced the phenomenon of "two schools under one roof," with children of different communities following separate schedules in the same building.
Policing is similarly fragmented. Republika Srpska has a single entity-level police force. The Federation has cantonal police forces, one per canton, loosely coordinated but not unified. The state-level agencies — border police, intelligence, financial crime — handle only matters assigned to the state level. There is no national police force.
Health follows roughly the same fracture line as education. Republika Srpska administers a single entity health fund. In the Federation, health insurance is organised at cantonal level, which means a worker who moves between cantons may find their coverage interrupted or their chosen doctor outside the network.
Infrastructure is where the state has its most visible presence — roads classified as national corridors fall under a state-level framework — but most roads, utilities and local services remain entity or municipal responsibilities. The Canton layer adds another budgeting point for capital investment in the Federation.
The practical consequence of this architecture is that a citizen's experience of government — how long they wait for a permit, what their child is taught, which hospital they can use — depends heavily on where they live within the country, not just on the country's national policies.