With the extension of its competence for social policy legislation in the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties, the EU has adopted a significantly new social dimension in the past ten years. According to the Copenhagen criteria, the CEEC candidate countries have to adopt the former via the acquis...

Trade between Eastern and Western Europe has increased considerably in the last years. Given this market-induced development, why should it be necessary to advance institutional integration? This paper argues that Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) can potentially enhance the...

This paper discusses the eastward enlargement process of the EU in the framework of a simple war of attrition bargaining game. Both players – the existing EU members and the applicants – benefit from enlargement, yet for the applicants reform to the acquis is costly, while the EU prefers...

Soft budget constraints (SBCs) are a persistent feature of transition economies and have been blamed for i.a. a lack of fiscal consolidation and sluggish growth. EU eastward enlargement has - among other things - been conditioned on tackling SBCs. This paper analyzes such outside conditionality...

This paper takes a welfare-view on eastern enlargement of the EU, focusing on incumbent countries. Enlargement is decomposed into three elements: Single-market integration on commodity markets, budgetary costs from EU-expenditure policies, and singlemarket- induced migration from new to present...