A Positive Explanation of EU Enlargement

Daniel Brou and Michele Ruta

No ECO2004/30, Economics Working Papers from European University Institute

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.

Keywords: Lobbying; Public Goods; International Unions; European Enlargement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 F02 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iue.it/PUB/ECO2004-30.pdf main text
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:eui:euiwps:eco2004/30

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from European University Institute Badia Fiesolana, Via dei Roccettini, 9, 50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI) Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cécile Brière ().