The paper looks into the effect globalisation and international integration produce on the quality of the institutional environment. By clustering twenty-eight EU countries and five former Soviet republics that are not integrated into the European framework using institutional environment quality indices (the corruption perceptions index, the index of economic freedom, the worldwide governance indicator), we are able to see a sustainable persisting difference between two groups of post-socialist states. We used Ward's method for clustering; calculations were done through the SPSS package. This method intends to create small clusters from the closest observations, which fits well the objectives of our study. Eastern European and Baltic countries come close to other EU states in terms of their institutional quality. These countries don't form their own cluster. Their institutional environment is consecutively improving, although these improvements have different speed. Former Soviet republics except for Kazakhstan form a single cluster notable for a similar state of the institutional environment, which is sustainable over the course of time. Unstable quality of institutional environment is common for south Europe countries. However, link between institutional quality and economic growth rates has not been revealed. Economic growth rates were significantly different in countries belonged to one cluster.