From Barcelona Process to Neighbourhood Policy: Assessments and Open Issues. CEPS Working Documents No. 220, 1 March 2005

The Barcelona process so far has been a valuable systemic/institutional advance in Euro-Med relations and a confidence-building measure on a large scale. But it has not been a sufficient driving force to have created a momentum of economic, political and social advance in the partner states. It is therefore quite plausible that the EU should seek some new advance – through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) – to build on the positive features of Barcelona and so try to introduce some new driving force. The Action Plans currently being adopted seek to make the often vague intentions of the Association Agreements of the Barcelona process more operational by linking them to either domestic policy programmes of the partner state or to EU policy norms and standards as an external anchor. In this paper we first crystallise alternative approaches for the ENP to become a real driving force under the headings of ‘conditionality’ and ‘socialisation’. The conditionality concept would mean that the EU sets out i) what incentives it offers, and ii) the conditions on which these incentives would be delivered. The socialisation concept relies essentially on a learning process that comes from the extensive interaction between actors in the partner states and the EU, which induces the partner states to engage in policy reforms that are to a degree modelled on EU norms or derive some inspiration from them. For the EU to become a driving force for reform in the region also requires that it does not have to face an uphill struggle against negative tendencies, for example in the widening and deepening of radical Islam – and here the issue of coherence in the approaches of the EU and US together is paramount

Information and communication technology (ICT) policy in the Central and South-Eastern Europe

Primary social aspects relevant for ICT include economic (commercial) and political issues as well as the traditionally ICT-intensive fields of high-tech and sciences. Aside of being the highest-growth sector in most western economies, ICT is inevitably a major factor in successful transition of the post-Communist and developing societies in the Central and South Eastern Europe (CSEE). The Stability Pact incorporated ICT policy issues as part of the “Third Wave” infrastructure reconstruction of the CSEE region strongly emphasising issues such as electronic networks and reforms to modernise business and governmental procedures. Among most crucial aspects are legislation and the role of government specially regarding the de-regulation and ICT market liberalisation issues. These are precisely the aspects that individual CSEE countries should solve themselves though the Stability Pact process should provide help and guidance (same holds for EU processes and pre-accession criteria)

Cointegration analysis of the monthly time-series relationship between retail sales and average wages in Croatia

A dynamic econometric model of Croatian monthly retail sales and wages is estimated through testing sequential model reduction validity. Such an approach aims at developing well-performing and interpretable dynamic relationships as data-description models. In addition to the model in levels a more economically interpretable error correction model was estimated enabling direct evaluation of the short-run impact of wage change to retail change as well as the periodic adjustment to the long-run equilibrium. It was established that, both in the short-run and in the long run, retail sales respond to wages thus forming a stable dynamic relationship