IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eui/euiwps/eco2004-30.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Positive Explanation of EU Enlargement

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Brou
  • Michele Ruta

Abstract

Models of international unions suggest that large and rich countries reap little economic benefits from political integration with smaller and poorer countries. This paper challenges this view by presenting a formal study of economic influence by special interest groups in an international union. We first show that countries where more groups are organized to lobby gain from political integration on economic grounds. The reason is that a more organized country, under a political union, can affect policies in the other country to its advantage, something that a less organized country can do to a lesser extent. We then argue that richer countries will tend to have more organized interest groups before political integration and show that this will continue to be the case afterward. Hence, the model implies that there are costs and benefits of EU Enlargement to Eastern Europe in addition to those suggested by the existing literature.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Brou & Michele Ruta, 2004. "A Positive Explanation of EU Enlargement," Economics Working Papers ECO2004/30, European University Institute.
  • Handle: RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2004/30
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.iue.it/PUB/ECO2004-30.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Thomas Plümper & Christina J. Schneider, 2007. "Discriminatory European Union Membership and the Redistribution of Enlargement Gains," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 51(4), pages 568-587, August.
    2. Walter Mattli & Thomas Plümper, 2004. "The Internal Value of External Options," European Union Politics, , vol. 5(3), pages 307-330, September.
    3. Michele Ruta, 2005. "Economic Theories of Political (Dis)integration," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 19(1), pages 1-21, February.
    4. Ruta, Michele, 2003. "The allocation of competencies in an international union: a positive analysis," Working Paper Series 220, European Central Bank.
    5. Christina Schneider, 2007. "Enlargement processes and distributional conflicts: The politics of discriminatory membership in the European Union," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 132(1), pages 85-102, July.
    6. Federico Etro, 2004. "The Political Economy of Fiscal and Monetary Unions," Giornale degli Economisti, GDE (Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia), Bocconi University, vol. 63(3-4), pages 289-328, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Lobbying; Public Goods; International Unions; European Enlargement;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • F02 - International Economics - - General - - - International Economic Order and Integration
    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2004/30. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Cécile Brière (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deiueit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.