This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

The forthcoming EU enlargement raises a series of questions related to the new entrants' entry to Exchange Rate Mechanism II and their subsequent adoption of the single currency. In this paper, the issue of how to determine the central parity for the acceding countries with which to enter ERM-II...