REGIONAL COOPERATION AND ECONOMIC INTEGRATION

REGIONAL TRADE AGREEMENTS AND REGIONAL COOPERATION
3. Monitoring and evaluation – an alternative method
3.1. International rankings and the Relative Total Performance
There are several experiments to use composite indices for measuring development
(Bandura, 2005). We have tried to make a selection from the worldwide available and
most widely used various rankings so that we are able to cover as many aspects of socialeconomic
and environmental development as possible. We believe that the global picture
drawn by the results of the individual rankings is suitable to assess and compare the
development level of the Balkan and East Central European region respectively, while
offering an exciting opportunity to compare the results of different types of development
analysis (Adamecz et al, 2008). On the one hand it allows the drawing of conclusions
about the relative situation about the country by way of a simultaneous examination of
several aspects; on the other hand the particular indicators arising from the statistical
and questionnaire based surveys used for the individual rankings provide a detailed image
of the social and economic situation and allows deeper comparisons. In our presentation
we will endeavour to cover both areas (Gáspár, 2008a).
However, in order to handle the findings in a uniform way and to describe the overall
situation we will take into consideration that the rankings first of all reflect the Euro-
Atlantic perspective and judgement but they allow a wider scope of evaluation of the
state of development of some Balkan and East Central European countries together with
their respective post-Lisbon Strategy development opportunities than the Lisbon
indicators or Eurostat’s index system of sustainable development.
One of the main difficulties of drawing the global image stems from the fact that the
international rankings have been created for a highly varying number of countries and
even the set of countries chosen for the individual rankings were of a highly diverse nature.
The social and economic image resulting from the particular indicators is not confused by
that, however, the overview, which takes into consideration several aspects simultaneously,
the group of countries involved in the examination had to be standardised. A too narrow
group of countries (e.g. regional or sub-regional groups such as the Visegrád countries)
would have excluded worldwide comparisons and the exploration of the central/peripheral
situations. At the same time we did not want to expand the group to include the greatest
number of countries present in all rankings because it would have distorted the picture
since the individual aspects of development do not change in a linear fashion from country
to country but there is a greater density thereof in the first third of the ranking lists. As a
consequence the wide spectrum would have obliterated the qualitative differences between
the developed and the quasi developed countries.
Therefore in the first instance we included 30 countries of OECD in our research, to
which we added 5 countries invited to be a full member of the organisation - Chile,
Estonia, Israel, Russia and Slovenia - as well as 5 potential members that OECD pay a
special attention to, namely Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. We have also
included in the circle those EU countries which are not OECD members as well as the
neighbouring and the South-Eastern European countries for a regional comparability.
From the latter we have excluded Albania and Moldova due to the great extent to which
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