Economic Growth and Political Integration: Estimating the Benefits from Membership in the European Union Using the Synthetic Co

Fabrizio Coricelli, Nauro Campos and Luigi Moretti

No 9968, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper presents new estimates of the economic benefits from economic and political integration. Using the synthetic counterfactuals method, we estimate how GDP per capita and labour productivity would have behaved for the countries that joined the European Union (EU) in the 1973, 1980s, 1995 and 2004 enlargements, if those countries had not joined the EU. We find large positive effects from EU membership but these differ across countries and over time (they are only negative for Greece). We calculate that without deep economic and political integration, per capita incomes would have been, on average, approximately 12 percent lower.

Keywords: Economic growth; European union; Synthetic counterfactuals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 F15 F43 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fdg and nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (113)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9968 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9968

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9968

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().