Naslov (eng)

How regional integration agreements can foster inclusive growth: lessons from exporting SMEs in the Western Balkans

Autor

Avlijaš, Sonja

Opis (eng)

Abstract: Empirical evidence on regional integration indicates that CEFTA’s Common Regional Market (CRM) could have spatially unequalising effects across the Western Balkans. Such an outcome would be in conflict with CEFTA’s goal of inclusive regional economic integration. This article offers a roadmap to avoid that pitfall. Literature on the changing global economy in the digital era and ICT-led growth and literature on the political economy of trust and cooperation between smaller economic agents are brought into a conversation with bottom-up empirical insights from small and medium enterprises (SME) from the region. Empirical data are collected from in-depth interviews with 58 export-oriented SMEs in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia. I find that smaller firms are immensely interdependent with the environments within which they operate and that their competitiveness also stems from their ability to successfully leverage on these communal resources and local public goods. Finding ways to preserve and enhance this collective infrastructure is often more of a priority for them than market expansion and technological progress. The paper concludes by arguing that designing (supranational) institutions which can facilitate local and translocal cooperation among competitive exporting SMEs would mobilise greater democratic support for the CRM project

Opis (eng)

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 895519. A version of this article was submitted to the LSEE-CEFTA Paper Competition 2021 on the theme “International Trade in Southeastern Europe: Obstacles and Opportunities for CEFTA and the Common Regional Market” and received the First Runner-up award

Jezik

engleski

Datum

2022

Licenca

Ovo delo je licencirano pod uslovima licence
Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode

Predmet

Keywords: regional economic integration, political economy of local development, small and medium enterprises, local public goods, economic resilience

Deo kolekcije (1)

o:28218

Ekonomski fakultet