EU Eastern Enlargement: Economic Effects on New Members 2000-2012

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has a splendid record concerning enlargement. Judging by the increasing number of EU member countries, enlargement has been the most successful EU policy ever. The economic side of its eastern enlargement is, however, a hybrid bag of effects for the EU’s eastern countries because membership in the EU is not a tide that lifts all boats. This article, as a statistical primer, provides consistent data for the period 2000~2012. Majority of data is from Eurostat, where the data on eastern EU member countries are scattered around in various parts of Eurostat database. In the effort to present the data in a consolidated and straightfoward way to reveal the real economic effects on enlargement on the new EU member countries, we took the task