  The process of European integration resulted in a marked increase in
transnational economic flows, yet regional inequalities along many
developmental indicators remain. We analyze the unevenness of European
economies with respect to the embedding of export sectors in upstream domestic
flows, and their dependency on dominant export partners. We use the WIOD data
set of sectoral flows for the period of 1995-2011 for 24 European countries. We
found that East European economies were significantly more likely to experience
increasing unevenness and dependency with increasing openness, while core
countries of Europe managed to decrease their unevenness while increasing their
openness. Nevertheless, by analyzing the trajectories of changes for each
country, we see that East European countries are also experiencing a turning
point, either switching to a path similar to the core, or to a retrograde path
with decreasing openness. We analyze our data using pooled time series models
and case studies of country trajectories.
