IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mes/eaeuec/v42y2004i5p6-35.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Enlargement of the European Union and the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity

Author

Listed:
  • TONI MORA
  • ESTHER VAYÁ
  • JORDI SURIÑACH

Abstract

One of the challenges facing regional policy in the European Union is the accession of new countries to the Single Market and to Economic and Monetary Union. Conditions in many of these East European regions are worse than in the least developed regions of the fifteen existing member states. Moreover, the accession of these countries is likely to have a marked effect on the geographical distribution of economic activity in the rest of the European Union (EU). Taking this into account, this article discusses the lessons that we have learned from the latest adhesions to the EU, in order to be able to predict what will arise from the enlargement scheduled for mid-2004. In this sense, we compute specialization and concentration indexes in order to highlight the effects of enlargement on the spatial distribution of activity in the EU. Additionally, inequality measures are calculated to describe the evolution of regional disparities before and after enlargement. A regional and national database for EU15 and for candidate countries with a high degree of sectoral detail from 1985 to 2001 is compiled. Analysis and some recommendations for regional policy are provided.

Suggested Citation

  • Toni Mora & Esther Vayá & Jordi Suriñach, 2004. "The Enlargement of the European Union and the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity," Eastern European Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(5), pages 6-35, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:mes:eaeuec:v:42:y:2004:i:5:p:6-35
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?target=contribution&id=5C7G6HF6L4QJJJRX
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Andreas Schäfer & Thomas Steger, 2014. "Journey into the Unknown? Economic Consequences of Factor Market Integration under Increasing Returns to Scale," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(4), pages 783-807, September.
    2. Scott W. Hegerty, 2016. "Regional Convergence and Growth Clusters in Central and Eastern Europe: An Examination of Sectoral-Level Data," Eastern European Business and Economics Journal, Eastern European Business and Economics Studies Centre, vol. 2(2), pages 95-110.
    3. Ana María López-Villuendas & Cristina del Campo, 2023. "Regional Economic Disparities in Europe: Time-Series Clustering of NUTS 3 Regions," International Regional Science Review, , vol. 46(3), pages 265-298, May.
    4. Juan Jung, 2012. "Externalities and Absorptive Capacity in a context of Spatial Dependence: The case of European Regions," Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) 2212, Department of Economics - dECON.
    5. Felbermayr, Gabriel & Grossmann, Volker & Kohler, Wilhelm, 2012. "Migration, International Trade and Capital Formation: Cause or Effect ?," FSES Working Papers 436, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland.
    6. Ana María López-Villuendas & Cristina Campo, 2024. "The impact of European regional cohesion policy on NUTS 3 disparities," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 73(3), pages 1297-1319, October.

    More about this item

    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:mes:eaeuec:v:42:y:2004:i:5:p:6-35. 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/MEEE20 .

    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.