AN ANALYSIS OF THE ECONOMIC CONVERGENCE PROCESS IN THE TRANSITION COUNTRIES

Urmas Varblane and Priit Vahter

No 37, University of Tartu - Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Working Paper Series from Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Tartu (Estonia)

Abstract: The paper is analysing the process of economic convergence of transition countries during the period 1995–2004. Within the analysed period unconditional ß-convergence across the transition economies existed. We could also discover the reduction of dispersion of income levels between accession countries (sigma-convergence). Comparative analyses of the new EU member states (NMS) economic convergence with the previous entrants into EU (Ireland, Greece, Spain, and Portugal) revealed that NMS have been much more successful in their convergence process before joining EU. Analyses of the macroeconomic, human capital, infrastructure indicators of the current accession countries compared with the previous cohesion countries indicated that the new members have been much better prepared to the enlargement. This allows drawing conclusion that the NMS face an opportunity to obtain much more rapid convergence process than expected by previous analyses, which have seriously undervalued the positive role of the pre-accession harmonisation process of NMS with the implementation of the major economic reforms in order to guarantee macroeconomic stability.

Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mjtoimetised.ut.ee/febpdf/febawb37.pdf (application/pdf)

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:mtk:febawb:37

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Tartu - Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Working Paper Series from Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Tartu (Estonia) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Liis Roosaar (liis.roosaar@ut.ee).