The Political Economics of European Enlargements: Sticking Together, Catching Up, and Forging Ahead

Nauro Campos

This presentation will discuss the theoretical and econometric literatures on European Enlargements and intends to be a call to arms for economists to be more involved in the next (Ukraine-led) enlargement. It is organised in three parts. The first discusses the main features of an economists’ conceptual framework (stressing the economic theories of integration, clubs, and convergence) and identifies areas that may need further research. The second part is on context and implementation: it provides a brief historical overview of the four enlargements so far (i.e., Northern, Southern, Scandinavian, and Eastern) and distil three main lessons and attendant suggestions for future research. The third part focuses on the attempts so far to estimate the net economic benefits from previous enlargements. It documents the huge heterogeneity at both enlargement and country levels (e.g. productivity gains for the Scandinavian enlargement were substantially lower than that for all others and, for an example on cross-country heterogeneity, Latvia benefited the most from membership while Greece benefited the least, with the productivity gains enjoyed by the former being at least three times larger than those by the latter.) The presentation concludes with even more suggestions for future policy-oriented research.