Competitiveness, Trade with the EU and Labour Markets: Challenges for the Western Balkans

Valerija Botric and Tanja Broz

South East European Journal of Economics and Business, 2016, vol. 11, issue 2, 20-32

Abstract: This paper focuses on the relationship between exporting and the labour markets of the Western Balkan economies within a macroeconomic and microeconomic framework. Within the macroeconomic framework we investigate the Western Balkan countries’ evolution of the bilateral intra-industry trade share with European Monetary Union members and compare this with the differences in bilateral unit labour cost dynamics. The microeconomic analysis rests on enterprise-level cross section data collected during the crisis period and investigates whether exporters help to create additional jobs in the region in comparison to entrepreneurs oriented towards national market. The results show that trade patterns between Western Balkan economies and EMU trading partners did not exhibit any significant changes in trend. On the other hand, it seems that during the recession period most Western Balkan economies adjusted their unit labour costs, probably in order to boost competitiveness. Microeconomic analysis revealed that, although there are some positive differences between exporters and non-exporters, exporters do not create additional employment.

Keywords: intra-industry trade; labour market; Western Balkan countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F15 F16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jeb-2016-0008 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vrs:seejeb:v:11:y:2016:i:2:p:20-32:n:2

DOI: 10.1515/jeb-2016-0008

Access Statistics for this article

South East European Journal of Economics and Business is currently edited by Adnan Efendic, Vesna Babić-Hodović and Aziz Šunje

More articles in South East European Journal of Economics and Business from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().