Measuring European economic integration

The three essays of this dissertation contribute to the measurement of European economic integration and investigate the welfare effects of the European countries. The first study presents a newly developed index – the EU Index – which measures the extent of economic integration into the European Union for the EU-15 member states over the period 1999–2010. The principal component analysis assigns accurate weights to the 25 indicators used in the index. Large heterogeneities are found between the member states with respect to overall integration and to various sub-indices. By using cluster a...