Serbia's accession to the EU – economic aspects of preparing for membership

Spasojević, Dunja

For the past 11 years, Serbia has been an official candidate country for membership in the European Union. As such, it is obligated to meet the Copenhagen criteria, in order to obtain the membership status. A crucial aspect of this criteria is competitiveness of the potential members, which includes their ability to compete within the EU‘s internal market. Hence, this thesis focuses on determining the competitiveness drivers of the member states and evaluating Serbia’s national competitiveness. The empirical part represents a comparative analysis of indicators relevant to this topic between Serbia and Croatia, the EU member state that is historically and geographically closest to Serbia. The research involves modeling and analyzing time series data covering the period from approximately the year 2000. The results indicate that Serbia lags behind Croatia primarily in macroeconomic indicators, such as GDP, unemployment rate, and inflation. In terms of investments in research and development (R&D) and enrollment in tertiary education, the two countries have no significant differences. However, Serbia has a long way to go in order to reach the EU average in all indicators analyzed.

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