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Introduction. The long-living and eventful Russia-Vietnam economic relations date back to the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance. Nowadays the continued deepening of these ties is occurring as part Eurasian integration. Goals. The article seeks to reveal further development prospects for bilateral relations and attempts an insight into the latter’s state of the art. Materials and methods. The work examines data from the UN Comtrade, Bank of Russia, Rosstat, Ministry of Internal Affairs, and those contained in Russian Statistical Yearbooks. Results. The recent years have witnessed a growing dynamics in trade cooperation between Russia and Vietnam. The paper notes it is trade in services plays a significant role in the interstate economic relations. The analysis of investment cooperation reveals an imbalance in investment flows in favor of Vietnam. The FDIs in oil production and trade have been identified as key investment endeavors. As for migration, Vietnam is defined as a donor country, and our analysis of migration flows shows the Russian Federation is simply not considered as a preferred destination for Vietnamese migrants. The article also pays attention to the change in the structure of Vietnam-to-Russia migration flow and articulates some underlying reasons. Conclusions. Despite the intensification of trade relations, none of the countries has implemented its export potential to the full. As for FDI cooperation, textile industry, wind power and IT sector stand out as promising areas. Another area for the development of bilateral relations is educational migration, since there is definitely still room for Russia to increase its attractiveness among Vietnamese youth.

Since Republic of North Macedonia has been a candidate country for European Union membership for almost two decades, the goal of this article is to shed a light on the conditions and requirements that were set before Macedonia and their evolution for this time period. For that purpose the article, annual reports of the European Commission on Macedonia’s progress were reviewed. Further on, analysis of the development of Macedonia’s macroeconomic indicators was carried out which was followed by a comparative analysis of the state of the economic development of the Central and Eastern European countries - member states of the European Union, at the moment of their accession. It was established that the EU enlargement process have undergone significant changes since its foundation. Over time, the changed political environment within the EU has led to a significant strengthening and tightening of the rules and criteria. The inefficiency of the latest accessions provoked the EU once again to change the accession negotiation process and introduce new accession process that is significantly more political than economic. In Macedonia’s case, it was political and not economic requirements that led to the country becoming stuck in its EU accession process. The economic results achieved by Macedonia during the researched period, even though lower than the average for the union, were still higher that the results shown by some Central and Eastern European counties at the time when they became members of the EU. Therefore, is no doubt, that Macedonia’s path to the EU was conditioned by political obstacles, the same situation continues today. But the major question that still stand unanswered is weather this kind increased politicization of the process is contradictory to the merit-based system the EU prides itself on.