CEFTA

This study evaluates the success of the EU’s strategy of regional cooperation in the Western Balkans over the last two decades from an
economic perspective. First, we define the prerequisites for successful
regional cooperation in an institutional, political and economic sense, and assess the extent to which they existed in the Western Balkans at
the start of the 2000s. Second, we identify the key facets of the EU’s strategy to deepen trade, investment and infrastructure connectivity in the Western Balkans, and establish the impact that this has had. Third, we assess the state of play in 2020, and make some suggestions for the way forward.

Our main findings are a) that many of the most important prerequisites for regional cooperation have not existed in the Western Balkans during
the past two decades, and that the potential gains from the EU strategy have therefore always been quite limited; b) that regional trade, investment and infrastructure integration has increased somewhat, but that there are still many gaps and challenges ahead; and c) that these efforts have not fundamentally altered the main obstacles to normalising political relations in the Western Balkans and, ultimately, to the EU accession of its constituent countries.

Our findings lead to two main conclusions. First, regional cooperation efforts should continue, but more effort should be focused on securing
the maximum possible level of economic integration with the EU. Second, economic development and EU accession in the region are
severely hamstrung by territorial disputes and constitutional deadlock. Without a breakthrough on these issues – and especially the normalisation of relations between Serbia and Kosovo – no amount of regional cooperation initiatives can fundamentally change the situation.

According to the recommendations of the European Union, countries seeking membership in the Union are encouraged to create free trade zones on their territories. CEFTA-2006 actually has the role of preparing countries for full-fledged membership in the Union. During the past decade, a long period of instability, international isolation, and economic turmoil adversely affected living standards of the vast majority of the population of the region, so Serbia readily waited the signing of this free trade agreement. CEFTA-2006 has its shortcomings but also has its advantages and we will try, in this article, to specify some of them.
As a result of the country’s growing integration with regional and world markets, Serbia has started to feel the effects of the current global economic crisis. The authors analyses the development of CEFTA-2006 in the new international surroundings and also exploring the development of cooperation in the SEE region and the future of CEFTA agreement. Live economic cooperation with their neighbors should bring Serbia and others countries in the region possibilities to overcome all the obstacles in the coming months.

The first of three publications on the '25 Years After - Mapping Civil Society in the Visegrád Four' project contains an overview of existing data and literature in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. It looks at where and what kind of research on civil society has been and is being done, who is doing it and where the gaps are. To be consistent and comparable, the four country reports include the same core sections: relevant publications on civil society in the respective country; existing databases and other data sources; active centres of research, training, and policy studies. More than providing just a list, we look at how they can be evaluated in terms of scope, accurateness and depth. Finally, we consider the question what the most crucial gaps in research and funding in the countries are. With this commented collection of data, we aim at providing a basis for further research on and the development of civil society in the region. Also, we try to show the...

This study aims to point out the unexploited export potential of CEFTA economies to the Russian market, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. More precisely, the Russian food market is examined, because of its size, the lack of domestic supply and actual changes of trading partners due to political and security antagonisms. The competitiveness of CEFTA food production on the Russian food market was analyzed by using two classical instruments of competitiveness-coefficient of conformity (CC) and real effective exchange rate (RER).CC is applied first to the CEFTA export and Russian import of food in total, and then to the six main Russian import food products. The results indicate the highest degree of matching between Russian import and all CEFTA country export of fruits, vegetable and its processed commodities. RER is calculated to show competitiveness in terms of prices in bilateral trade, and result shows a very favorable ratio of currency, except in the case of Montenegro and Bosnia because their fixation to euro. Due to the small size of CEFTA production and non-proportional large Russian market, the interconnection, e.g. forming the value chain made of CEFTAs agriculture and food industry companies is suggested as the basis of new CEFTA export strategy.