Macroeconomic Imbalances and the Economic Convergence of the EU candidate countries.

The paper assesses the relevance of the EU Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure scoreboard for the EU candidate countries. The calculation of the 14 indicators for a nine years period proves the recent economic crisis helped resolve some of the imbalances in the EU candidate countries but on the back of the slowing down the economic growth and convergence. The paper argues that MIP scoreboard fails to capture the specifics of economic developments of the caching up economies and cannot be used as a tool for assessing their readiness to join the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]