IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2026-196.html

Deepening EU–Western Balkans Economic Integration: Scope and Economic Gains

Author

Listed:
  • Mr. Lev Ratnovski

Abstract

The paper examines opportunities for deeper economic integration between the EU and the Western Balkans and assesses their potential economic impact. It documents key non-tariff barriers to Western Balkan–EU industrial goods trade—covering regulatory, customs, and border-logistics frictions—amounting to around 8–14 percent ad valorem equivalent. Reducing these barriers, alongside deeper agri-food and services integration, could generate substantial gains, allowing the Western Balkans to capture roughly one-quarter to one-half of the economic benefits of full EU membership while supporting EU objectives related to nearshoring, supply-chain resilience, regional integration, and connectivity.

Suggested Citation

  • Mr. Lev Ratnovski, 2026. "Deepening EU–Western Balkans Economic Integration: Scope and Economic Gains," IMF Working Papers 2026/196, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2026/196
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/longres?sk=579390
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2026/196. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.