Economic Profiles of Three Western Balkans Economies and Slovenia

In this chapter, we examine the economic profiles of the three Western Balkan (WB) economies. We conduct a comparative analysis of our findings using Slovenia as the benchmark country. Our focus is primarily on the economic composition, economic productivity and performance of these countries’ innovation systems. We identify similarities and differences among the four economies. We see that their similarities relate, for the most part, to their histories (all were former socialist economies), but also to their population size and geographic proximity. The differences among Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia are relatively small, but the economic differences between these three countries and Slovenia are sizeable. For 50 years, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Slovenia were part of the former Yugoslavia, but, even then, there were some differences among them. For example, in 1990, per capita gross national product was, respectively, Dinars 65 and Dinars 200, compared to Dinars 24 in Kosovo. Similarly, unemployment rates in Slovenia and North Macedonia were, respectively, 5.1% and 23.0%, compared to 38.8% in Kosovo (Štiblar, 2013).