Western Balkan (WB) countries have a clear orientation towards the European Union (EU), all of them currently being candidate or potential candidate countries. Moreover, the EU is an important trading partner of the WB economies, therefore, there is a recognizable need for convergence of this region towards the EU economy. The real convergence is a rather slow process and the WB region is still lagging behind the EU. This paper explores the catch up of the WB region during the global crisis that severely hit the EU economy, trying to identify potential changes in the convergence pace. In addition, this work makes a joint overview of the nominal and real convergence processes as well as the convergence of the general macroeconomic indicators of the WB countries to the EU, taking them as complementary and mutually self-supporting processes.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

The recent global crisis brought many challenges to the central bankers worldwide, including the issue of monetary policy objectives. In this view, besides price stability maintenance, a special attention by central bankers during the crisis was given to the output stabilization. This paper explores this issue on the case of a group of countries from Southeast Europe (SEE). For this purpose, rather simple analysis of the policy rate and output gap as well as output gap variability by countries have been provided, aimed at giving some initial insights of the monetary policy and output stabilization during the crisis. Our findings pointed that the central banks in the analysed SEE countries paid attention to the output stabilization, specifically during the crisis period and that was presumably enabled by controllable inflation developments.

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