The Integration of Accession States into Multinational Produc-tion Networks and their Effects on Exports and Development
Which effects had the EU accession perspective and the related foreign direct investment (FDI) on the development of trade of future eastern members of the EU? We tried to analyse this question in detail, mainly based on the OECD for-eign trade statistics. We wanted not only to see how the integration into existing co-operation networks showed in statistics and if there was a common pattern of structural change, but also if this would change the competitive situation, con-tribute to the development of export-linked clusters in the accession states and create spill-over effects on exports into non EU countries.
Other questions were related to the influence of diverging starting conditions: would earlier acceding countries develop significantly better than those acced-ing at a later stage? Would different economic situations modify the develop-ment of exports?
The use of the OECD data, which were chosen for their disaggregation into 4275 three to five digit product groups, limited our effort to a selection of six countries, three of them acceding in 2004 – the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland –, three others at a later date – Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. We did a more detailed analysis on the first three countries and then checked for simi-larities with the last three. Due to missing data we had to choose 1993 as a starting year for trade data. 2001 was the last available year from the OECD.
