Strategic Aspects of the 1995 and 2004 EU Enlargements

Abstract

While the 1995 entrants to the EU are by now fully integrated, those joining in 2004 still "enjoy" a secondary status for a number of years. We attribute this difference to the fact that unlike the former EFTA members joining in 1995, the 2004 entrants formed a group with heterogenous interests, one that lacked the same strong internal economic ties. Not being able to act as a unified block they had a considerably weaker bargaining position. We support our arguments by qualitative results from a simple model, a dynamic partition function game based on Yi (Games Econ Behav 20:201-237, 1997) and Morelli and Penelle (Economic integration as a partition function game 1997).[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]