Why is this Financial Crisis Occuring? How to Respond to It?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of 2004 accession to the European Union on perceptions related to business risks in Central and Eastern European countries. The investigation makes use of the data provided by the Regular Reports on Global Competitiveness published annually by the World Economic Forum. Methodologically, our analysis requires the estimation of an average for the core of 15 member states of the European Union (EU 15) for each individual pillar considered to describe properly the business environment. In doing so, it is possible to measure the convergence – in terms of a distance-type analysis – of the new member states with the average of EU 15, prior and after the accession, comparatively. In addition, based on a k-means clustering technique, we investigate similarities between the same countries, as well as the convergence of different groups of countries with the group which contains this average.