Doctor Joachim Zweynert, from the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, spoke to RT about the transition performance of Bulgaria and Romania in relation to the issue of EU conditionality.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the transition process started in the early 1990s, people, and especially social scientists, expected the countries in the region would quickly turn into democracies with market economies,\u201d Doctor Zweynert told RT. \u201cWhat we see today, 20 years after the process started, is a great divergence in both political and economic systems.\u201d
\nZweynert said that there are many factors behind such an outcome.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne explanation is that there are different cultural and historical legacies, such as Orthodox Christianity on the one hand and Protestantism and Catholicism on the other hand,\u201d Zweynert explained. \u201cWe look at Bulgaria and Romania as a sword of natural experiment, as they are the only two countries in this Orthodox group that were exposed to EU conditionality. What we can observe is that these two countries have significantly improved their transition performance after they were exposed to the EU conditionality.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: Prime Time Russia Doctor Joachim Zweynert, from the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, spoke to RT about the transition performance of Bulgaria and Romania in relation to the issue of EU conditionality. \u201cWhen the transition process started in the early 1990s, people, and especially social scientists, expected the countries in the region would quickly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[6,296],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9708"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9708"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9715,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9708\/revisions\/9715"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}