  Core objectives of European common market integration are convergence and
economic growth, but these are hampered by redundancy, and value chain
asymmetries. The challenge is how to harmonize labor division to reach global
competitiveness, meanwhile bridging productivity differences across the EU. We
develop a bipartite network approach to trace pairwise co-specialization, by
applying the Revealed Comparative Advantage method, within and between EU15 and
Central and Eastern European (CEE). This approach assesses redundancies and
division of labor in the EU at the level of industries and countries. We find
significant co-specialization among CEE countries but a diverging
specialization between EU15 and CEE. Productivity increases in those CEE
industries that have co-specialized with other CEE countries after EU
accession, while co-specialization across CEE and EU15 countries is less
related to productivity growth. These results show that a division of sectoral
specialization can lead to productivity convergence between EU15 and CEE
countries.
