331-341

• Kurnoga Zivadinovic, Natasa
• Dumicic, Ksenija
• Ceh Casni, Anita

The last wave of EU enlargement ended on 1st January 2007 with the accession of Romania andBulgaria. Many countries of the South-Eastern Europe aspire to join the EU. Croatia appears to be the nextprospective member, so the aim of this paper was to classify Croatia and EU 27 Member States according to thestructural economic indicators. These countries were gathered into homogenous groups in terms of thefollowing structural economic indicators: GDP per capita, total employment rate, comparative price levels,employment rate of older workers, long term unemployment and productivity of national economies expressedin relation to the European Union (EU-27) average. Firstly, the cluster analysis was used on three structuraleconomic indicators: GDP per capita, total employment rate and comparative price levels. The hierarchicalcluster analysis and non-hierarchical cluster analysis were applied and gave similar results. The factor analysiswas then provided to find out the common factors of six structural economic indicators: GDP per capita, totalemployment rate, comparative price levels, employment rate of older workers, long term unemployment andproductivity of national economies. Two factors were extracted and the factor scores for each observation werecalculated. The factor scores were used in further cluster analysis and again similar results of classification wasgiven.

• Economics and Business

• Οικονομία
• Financial management
• Economic development

classification, structural economic indicators, multivariate methods, hierarchical cluster analysis, non-hierarchical cluster analysis, factor analysis

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