THE OPEN BALKAN AS A DEVELOPMENT DETERMINANT OF THE WESTERN BALKAN COUNTRIES

The paper starts from the concept of the Open Balkan as a community of countries in the Western Balkans, aimed at strengthening their economic cooperation and development for faster integration in the European Union. Significant attention is paid to the analysis of the interdependence of (in)stability of the state and the economic development of small countries. The position of the Open Balkan and its members is also analysed on the basis of the selected global composite indices. An important subject of the analysis is also the condition of institutional capacities of the members of the Open Balkan and their institutional cooperation from the perspective of faster progress towards the European integration. Two main hypotheses have been tested in the paper: (H1) CEEs countries are not a homogeneous group of countries; and (H2) The Western Balkans is a relatively homogeneous regional integration. To test the convergence hypothesis between 16 Central and Eastern European countries (CEEs), annual data from World Bank’s database on the value of real gross domestic product per capita (in constant dollars 2017, PPP) in the period 2000-2026 were used (projected values for the period until 2026). We employed the method developed by Phillips Sul (2007) that allows identification of clusters of convergence on the basis of an algorithm that is data-driven and thereby avoids a priori classification of the data into subgroups. Based on the results obtained, it can be concluded that Serbia is the “locomotive” of the Western Balkans and that all countries in this area should join the regional initiative for cooperation, the Open Balkan.