期刊名称：South-Eastern Europe Journal of Economics (SEEJE)
印刷版ISSN：1109-8597
电子版ISSN：1792-3115
出版年度：2007
卷号：5
期号：2
出版社：Association of Economic Universities of South and Eastern Europe and the Black Sea Region
摘要：This paper seeks to provide a representation of European economic integration that would discriminate between the random effect of regional clustering by geographical vicinity (as the conventional area definitions suggest) and the hypothesized effect of competitive developments underpinned by homogeneous areas of integration. The investigation is based on a simple but comprehensive statistical analysis of the competitive position of thirty-three European countries, for which data were collected targeting five determinants of competitive similarity and twenty-seven corresponding indicators. The results confirm the fact that countries tend to cluster into larger groups the more general their denominator is, say, political legacy, historical circumstances or shared ideology. At the same time, a set of group behavioral patterns suggests that a better understanding of regional effects of integration strongly relates to a similarly better representation of regional groupings based on comparable competitive evolutions.
关键词：Competitive area; Economic similarity; European regions
