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The eye, the needle and the camel: Rich countries can benefit from EU membership

Campos, F. N., Coricelli, F. & Moretti, L. (2014) “The eye, the needle and the camel: Rich countries can benefit from EU membership“, VoxEU Organisation, 05 April.

 

One concern with EU enlargement is that relatively poorer countries benefit more from becoming members. This column uses data from the 1973 and 1995 enlargements to show that richer countries also benefited a lot from joining the EU. Per capita incomes would have been considerably lower had these countries not joined the EU when they did. Yet, the difference between the estimated benefits for 1973 and 1995 enlargements is large, and thus, should not be attributed to differences in per capita incomes at the time of joining.

EU members are all alike; every EU candidate is a candidate in its own way. This is, of course, our attempt at rephrasing Anna Karenina’s opener (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”). Tolstoy had marriage in mind while Diamond (1997) had domesticated animals. For pets and marriages, success happens not because of one particular, positive, exceptional feature, but because of the lack of key negative traits.

 

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