REGIONAL COOPERATION AND ECONOMIC INTEGRATION

PART V:
monopolistic companies is evident which dictate the prices of numerous goods. Frequent
problem in Serbia like in other West Balkan countries is the illegal implementation of
privatization process that causes bitterness and dissatisfaction in people, especially the
unemployed ones, but also it influences people who managed to keep their jobs. Perhaps
the most serious problem regarding the privatization is corruption. The rhetoric of the
market fundamentalism claims that the privatization will reduce the activities of „charging
rent“ that government officials charge. They also „skim milk“ from the profits of the public
companies or give contracts or major jobs to their friends. But contrary to what had been
expected, privatization made things much worse, so in many countries privatization is
called „bribery“ (Stiglic, 2002). Unfortunately, corruption is present in all West Balkan
countries and it represents the key problem that must be urgently solved.
Table 7: The Global Competitiveness index : West Balkan countries
Source: The Global Competitiveness Report 2008-2009
CONCLUSION
By analyzing general and particular indices as the key pillars of competitiveness in one
country, we noticed that the majority of countries were unfavourably ranked, thus the
achieved results were not so good. The exception is Croatia, which in stands out in many
areas compared to other countries in the region. Croatia will certainly achieve strong and
stable competitive position in the region in the following period if it continues to follow this
direction. Primarily Serbia, and then Macedonia , have considerable potentials that must
be improved and directed in the right way in order to create favourable attractive investing
environment that would attract foreign investors and thus bring significant advantages to
the mentioned countries. Unfortunately, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania have the
worst ranking and the values of its indices, subindices and pillars of competitiveness are
among the lowest in the world. The main reason for falling behind of these countries are
numerous political and destabilization problems, as well as their insufficient decisiveness
and persistence in implementation and finishing of the transitional process. However, we
must emphasize that in the West Balkan countries the different unfavourable influences
from the environment are present. The powerful multinational companies, international
institutions, governments of the strong and stable countries to whom the developing
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