Trade, Integration and Cooperation

Trade is crucial for economic growth but also for creating incentives to cooperate peacefully among neighboring countries. Trade creation in the Balkans is complicated by the fact that some of the newly created countries are not yet members of the WTO and that countries in the Balkans have only a very short history of any broader cooperation in trade — with the exception of the Danube Commission concerning only certain countries and EU’s support within the PHARE program which helped to establish a modernized customs system. The Black Sea Cooperation Group which goes back to a Turkish initiative in the 1990s has not achieved much.