Economic Convergence in the Western Balkans

Over the past two decades, the Western Balkans have made only limited progress in closing the gap with the EU: the region’s average GDP per capita rose from 27% of the EU average in 2003 to 43% in 2025 (see Table 1).

In November 2023, the European Commission announced the new Growth Plan for the Western Balkans to accelerate the region's convergence with the European Union, creating a need for a monitoring tool to assess the policy outcomes of the Western Balkans' Reform Agendas.

Leveraging data and input collected as part of a decade-long policy assessment by the OECD, the first pilot version of the Scoreboard was launched in 2023 to inform the discussions at the Western Balkans Berlin Process Leaders' Summit. Building on this pilot, the first complete edition of the Scoreboard was released in 2025 under the framework of Poland's EU Presidency and presented at the Berlin Process Leaders' Summit in London, where the 2025 Chair's Conclusions recognised the Scoreboard as the region's annual monitoring tool for economic convergence.

The third edition, Economic Convergence Scoreboard for the Western Balkans 2026, financed by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria, provides a comprehensive picture of the region's economic convergence with the EU between 2014 and 2024. It draws on 43 outcome indicators across six policy clusters, up from 35 indicators and five clusters in the 2025 edition—infrastructure and connectivity, skills, business environment, digital transformation, greening, and, new to this edition, macro-financial stability—as detailed in the accompanying brochure.

The 2026 Scoreboard report is accompanied by a set of supporting materials, including the underlying dataset , a dashboard that presents the key convergence scores by policy clusters.