The new EU Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure and its Relevance for the Candidate Countries

The paper presents the main features of the new macroeconomic imbalances procedure (MIP) as well as the MIP scoreboard for the surveillance of macroeconomic imbalances. The main issues under review are the relevance to use the MIP scoreboard as a tool to assess the vulnerabilities and imbalances of the EU candidate countries and whether it is suitable for the candidate countries to use the scoreboard as an early warning tool and a benchmarking tool for the economic policy design. The analysis of the imbalances in the Western Balkan countries suggests that they are not linked to the crisis but more to the restructuring of the economy and the caching-up process. The relative resilience of the crisis proves the flexibility and capabilities for adjustment of those economies.