Abstract
The Western Balkans have aspired to membership of the European Union (EU) for years. However, they have to
fulfil a number of political, social and economic criteria in the pre-accession process, as all other candidate
countries did before. Our study focuses on the development gap between the applicant countries and the EU
member states. We analyze the socio-economic development of the five Western Balkan countries: Albania,
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia and compares them with the socio-economic
development of the European Union member states. The research covers the time period from 2000 until 2019.
We use 'tailor-made' Synthetic Measures of Development (SMDs) to assess the level of socio-economic
development of the countries under study. These measures implement a multidimensional taxonomic distance
between the analyzed economies and a hypothetical benchmark (according to Hellwig's concept). The empirical
findings show that the analyzed Western Balkans countries are significantly less developed than the EU countries
and did not change the last cluster of the classification throughout the whole research timeframe. This leads to the
conclusion of inefficient use of pre-accession funds and negligible socio-economic convergence.