Paper Titles & Abstracts

The monetary integration respectively EU convergence requires much more efforts, coordination and discipline from the EU institutions as well as from the EU member states. Despite the importance of the economic development for these countries there is a lack of the political and institutional efforts in order to provide sustainable institutions and economic development.The main questions to be addressed in this paper are: if EU institutions ensures the long term progress and reforms or just their functioning ensures stability and emergent solutions for EU member states? Do EU member states have an active role on the process in order to create a sustainable development? The third important issue to be addressed is to analyze if Western Balkan countries learned from the EU crises in order to influence their local government decisions and commitment for EU reforms in the future.The current EU financial crises has shown that EU countries should continue with the EU Convergence criteria's and develop the local ownership in order to sustain economically and reduce asymmetric shocks coming from the globalization and Europeanization. EU integration process does not guarantee a permanent economic sustainability for the member states without labor productivity, high level of education, efficiency, competition. Finally, the lessons to be learned from the crises for EU member states but also for candidate countries is that the EU integration process is only the framework and guide for reforms but the main efforts should come from the individual countries.