Attila Ágh, Judit Kis, Varga (eds)

New Perspectives for the EU team presidencies

The East Central European and Balkan countries have made remarkable efforts since 1990 to change their economic and political systems and to adapt standards which are necessary to join the mainstream of the European integration. The qualitative aspects of this process of transformation have been analyzed in the last two decades in countless political and economic publications. The quantitative side of the recent development has been investigated for example by Klaus Armingeon and Romana Careja (Armingeon and Careja, 2008) on a dataset which has been designed and collected by the authors for comparative research on post-communist countries. Wolfgang Merkel has also analysed (Merkel, 2008) the transformation of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia which has referred to the data source of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2006. The aim of my chapter is to analyze the recent political and economic situation in the East Central European and Balkan countries and to ask about the validity of the results in the former research. The comparative investigation has been made on the recently published dataset of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2008.