In the eighth and last episode of Henrik Enderlein Fellow Besa Shahini’s podcast miniseries exploring the EU accession process in the Western Balkans and the lessons for EU enlargement policy, she discusses the power of EU accession for economic transformation with Richard Grieveson, deputy director at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) and member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG).
Accession to the EU has had an enormous economic impact on Central and Eastern European member states. Accession to the EU has not only narrowed the gap between older and newer member states but made some of these newer members wealthier than their older counterparts today. In this episode, Besa Shahini asks Richard Grieveson, deputy director at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) and member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG), what factors contributed to this economic transformation, whether current candidate countries can be made a promise of equal economic growth and how the states of the Western Balkan could profit from economic integration ahead of full accession.
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