The recent proposal by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso’s to close Croatia’s four remaining accession chapters, and setting July 1 2013 as a tentative accession date, reaffirms our long-held view that Croatia will join the EU by 2013. However, there remain a number of obstacles on the road to full EU membership. The proposal… [Read more]
“If you have a lot of what people want and can’t get, then you can supply the demand and shovel in the dough”. – Lucky Luciano It’s a simple enough concept, and one that helped make the father of modern organised crime in the United States cited above ‘one of the most influential builders and… [Read more]
Convergence – the process by which less developed economies ‘catch-up’ with their more developed peers through rapid improvements in productivity – has been the dominant story throughout Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) for the better part of two decades now. Certainly, it is the prevalent model by which most analysts expect the Western Balkans to… [Read more]