According to the latest research carried out by the World Economic Forum (WEF) "The Lisabon Review 2010", several accession countries are closer to meeting the Lisbon Goals than many of the longer-standing EU member and Croatia and Montenegro outperformed the four lowest-ranked EU Members - Poland, Italy, Romania and Bulgaria.
Croatia is ranked on the high second place, immediately after Montenegro, which is the first in the group of candidate countries and potential EU candidates.
Furthermore, Turkey and Macedonia outperformed Bulgaria.
Croatia"s main strengths are its network industries and efforts toward sustainable development, where it does better than the Accession 12 countries. With regard to weaknesses, both Croatia and Montenegro require efforts in improving their enterprise environment, with burdensome regulation and an onerous process required to start businesses, especially in Montenegro.
Sweden remains the most competitive economy as measured by the EU own competition benchmark, the Lisbon criteria, followed by Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands.
The World Economic Forum"s study is the fifth and final review in a biennial series that assesses the progress made by EU Member countries in the far-reaching goals of the EU"s Lisbon Strategy of economic and structural reforms. In addition to assessing the performance of 27 existing EU Members, it also measures the competitive performance of EU candidates and potential candidate countries.
The Review was released on Tuesday ahead of the upcoming World Economic Forum on Europe. It was carried by the Croatian National Competitiveness Council.
