Governance Trends among New EU Member States: Is There Institutional Convergence?

Valentina Vučković, Ružica Šimić Banović and Martina Basarac Sertić
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Valentina Vučković: Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
Ružica Šimić Banović: Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
Martina Basarac Sertić: Economic Research Division, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 24, 1-15

Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to explore the institutional convergence of Central and Eastern European Union member countries as a possible consequence of both the transfer of selected Western formal institutions to those countries and the adoption of acquis communautaire . This issue dates back to the beginning of the 1990s when the predominant expectation was that the successful formal institutions in Western countries would yield the same results in transition countries. In the meantime, mainly because of informal constraints, this has shown to be a misconception in most cases. The methodology used in the paper is twofold. First, by means of descriptive statistics, and using the varieties of capitalism approach, we show that, when analysing institutional quality using the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), there are two divergent groups of EU countries. The first group consists of Liberal, Nordic, and Continental countries, and the second consists of Mediterranean and CEE member states that are further divided into liberal and coordinated market economies. Second, based on the calculation of the σ- and unconditional β-convergence of governance trends in the period 1996–2019, we empirically confirm that there are also variations within the CEE countries as well as within the specific dimensions of governance.

Keywords: convergence; divergence; institutions; post-socialism; transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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