Source: Carnegie
For Immediate Release: May 6, 2003
Contact: Jayne Brady, 202-939-2372, jbrady@ceip.org
Commonwealth of Independent States Can Benefit
From EU Enlargement
First, Carnegie Paper Concludes, EU Trade Policy Needs Improvement
Within a few years, ten former communist countries lined up to become members of the European Union. What will this mean to the twelve former Soviet countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)? Anders Åslund, senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Andrew Warner, economist at the National Bureau for Economic Research, have joined forces to review the broad impact the new alignment will have on CIS countries.
The new working paper, The Enlargement of the European Union Consequences for the CIS Countries, focuses on the crucial trade issue and shows, through statistical analysis, that the CIS countries suffer from EU discrimination. The authors review trade policy between EU and the nearby Central European countries for indirect effects on the CIS countries. They note that the "EU has been surprisingly successfully in accommodating the CEE countries' trade interests, but it has done very little for the CIS countries' trade interests."
The report concludes that once the Central European countries have acceded to the EU, then policy-making resources and will be freed-up and the EU will turn its focus toward the CIS countries and improving trade. "Therefore, the CIS countries may benefit considerably from the completion of the current EU enlargement in a roundabout and unanticipated fashion," they write.
To read the full paper, go to www.ceip.org/pubs.
Anders Åslund
is a leading specialist on post-communist economic transformation especially
in Russia and Ukraine. A senior associate in the Carnegie Endowment's Russian
and Eurasian Program, he has served as senior economic advisor to the governments
of Russia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. He is the author of Building Capitalism:
The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge University Press,
2001).
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