Suchergebnisse

"Serbia and the European Union" published on by Oxford University Press.

This paper analyses structural change in the European Union (EU) over the past two decades, with the aim of providing some guidelines for the Western Balkan (WB) countries. After recalling the main theories of structural change, the paper illustrates the general trend of decline in the relative shares of manufacturing output and employment in the old and the new EU member states, pointing to distinctive features of the East European countries. It proceeds to show how structural change in the WB countries has had additional characteristics, specific to the region. The WB countries have experienced a process of extreme de-industrialization that has reduced the contribution of manufacturing too quickly, to levels which are not consistent with their relatively low level of economic development. What is necessary is a strategy of re-industrialization of the WB economies that would strengthen their export capacity and facilitate more robust economic growth.

International aid and assistance to the Western Balkans, which began more than two decades ago after the disintegration of sfr Yugoslavia, has been severely criticised on various grounds by academics, politicians, and domestic elites. One of the main points of criticism has been heavy foreign interference into domestic affairs, which deprives local policy-makers of 'policy ownership.' This paper uses four paradigmatic examples of reform in Serbia – in the areas of labor market, income taxation, pensions system, and privatization – to show that, despite the widely accepted view of the dominant role of international actors in the creation of the reform agenda, there was significant room for local policy-makers in Serbia to exercise full ownership over the ongoing reforms. What policy-makers really needed was expertise, a clear vision of the desired reforms, the determination to defend their agenda, and technical skills to implement it. The significantly different outcomes of the four areas of reform analyzed in this paper, despite involving virtually the same actors of international intervention, seem to illustrate well our hypothesis that the failure of some important sectoral reforms in Serbia during the post-2000 period was the result of the policy-makers' own weaknesses, rather than the result of external conditionality.