For about a decade, GDP growth in Central European countries has been consistently faster than in the 'old' EU-15. As a first approximation, one can expect a growth differential of about 2 percentage points to prevail also in the future. This practical rule-of-thumb is broadly consistent with...

This paper looks at the experience of South East Europe which – for the purposes of this paper – includes the former states of Yugoslavia except for Slovenia (i.e. Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia), Albania, and the two EU candidate countries, Bulgaria and...