Examination of European Union economic cohesion: A cluster analysis approach

• Authors: Jiri Mazurek
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In the past years majority of EU members experienced the highest economic decline in their modern history, but impacts of the global financial crisis were not distributed homogeneously across the continent. The aim of the paper is to examine a cohesion of European Union (plus Norway and Iceland) in terms of an economic development of its members from the 1st of January 2008 to the 31st of December 2012. For the study five economic indicators were selected: GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, labour productivity and government debt. Annual data from Eurostat databases were averaged over the whole period and then used as an input for a cluster analysis. It was found that EU countries were divided into six different clusters. The most populated cluster with 14 countries covered Central and West Europe and reflected relative homogeneity of this part of Europe. Countries of Southern Europe (Greece, Portugal and Spain) shared their own cluster of the most affected countries by the recent crisis as well as the Baltics and the Balkans states in another cluster. On the other hand Slovakia and Poland, only two countries that escaped a recession, were classified in their own cluster of the most successful countries

Keywords

EN

Cluster analysis, cohesion, economics, European Union

• Publisher: Prague Development Center, Czech Republic
• Journal: Business and Economic Horizons
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 8-17

Dates

published

2014-01-25

Contributors

author

Jiri Mazurek

References

• Aiginger, K., 2011. "Why Performance Differed Across Countries in the Recent Crisis How Country Performance in the Recent Crisis Depended on Pre-crisis Conditions", WIFO Working Papers, No.387
• Aiginger, K., 2013. "A new strategy for the European periphery", WWWforEurope Policy Paper, No. 1
• Beblavý, M., Cobham, D., Ódor, L. (Eds.), 2011. "EURO area and the financial crisis", Cambridge University Press, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139044554
• Chiang, M. M., Mirkin, B., 2009. "Intelligent Choice of the Number of Clusters in K-Means Clustering: An Experimental Study with Different Cluster Spreads", Journal of Classification 27
• Eurostat, 2013. National accounts. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/national_accounts/data/main_tables, accessed on 12th Nov. 2013
• Eurostat, 2013a. http://epp.eurostat.ec. europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&plugin=1& language=en&pcode=tec00115, accessed on 12th Nov. 2013
• Eurostat, 2013b. http://epp.eurostat.ec. europa.eu/portal/page/portal/product_details/dataset?p_product_code=une_rt_a, accessed on 12th Nov. 2013
• Eurostat, 2013c. http://epp.eurostat.ec. europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&plugin= 1&language=en&pcode=tec00118, accessed on 12th Nov. 2013
• Eurostat, 2013d. http://epp.eurostat.ec. europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&plugin= 1&language=en&pcode=tec00116, accessed on 12th Nov. 2013
• Eurostat, 2013e. http://appsso.eurostat.ec. europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=gov_dd_edpt1&lang= en, accessed on 12th Nov. 2013
• Hartigan, J. A., 1975. "Clustering algorithms", John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Hartigan, J. A., Wong, M. A., 1979. "A K-means Clustering Algorithm: Algorithm AS136", Appl. Statistics, 28, pp. 100-108, http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2346830
• Karasavvoglou, A., Polychronidou, P. (Eds.), 2014. "Economic Crisis in Europe and the Balkans: Problems and Prospects", Springer, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00494-5
• Kattel, R., Raudla, R., 2013. "The Baltic Republics and the Crisis of 2008 - 2011", Europe-Asia Studies, 65(3), pp. 426-449, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2013.779456
• Lloyd, S. P., 1982. "Least Squares Quantization in PCM", In IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 28 (2), pp. 129-137, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIT.1982.1056489
• Mazurek, J., 2013. "A Comparison of GDP growth of European countries during 2008-2012 period from regional and other perspectives, " MPRA Paper 51178, University Library of Munich, Germany
• Mazurek, J., Mielcová, E., 2013. "The Evaluation of Economic Recession Magnitude: Introduction and Application",. Prague Economic Papers, vol. (2), pp. 182-205
• Meloun, M., Militký, J., 2006. "Kompendium statistického zpracování dat", 2nd edition. Prague: Academia
• Mian, A., Sufi, A., 2010. "The Great Recession: Lessons from Microeconomical Data", American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 100 (2), pp.1-10, http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.2.51
• NCSS, 2013. Statistical and Power Analysis Software Home Page. On-line, cit. [2010-09-30]. Available from WWW:
• Verick, S., Islam, I., 2010. "The great recession of 2008 - 2009: Causes, consequences and policy responses", Bonn: IZA

Identifiers

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.15208/beh.2013.18