10 Years of Austrian EU Membership: Elements of an Overall Economic Assessment

Austria has been a member of the EU for ten years now. Although accession to the EU would have been economically feasible much sooner, for political reasons, in particular, it had to wait until the end of the Soviet era. On balance, this has been quite a positive decade, though so many relevant changes took place simultaneously — worldwide liberalization trends, the opening up of Central and Eastern Europe, and the establishment of monetary union, to name a few — that it is hardly possible to identify which effects stem solely from EU accession. It is equally inadvisable to see the process of European integration, in its all-inclusiveness, purely under economic aspects. Accession to the EU has fundamentally changed the institutional landscape, which today is dominated by Europe. It has also left its imprint on financial markets and foreign trade as well as the labor market and the regulatory framework. Many of those changes would have been unavoidable even without EU accession. However, in many cases accession was the catalyst for a renewal; in its absence, many structural adjustments would have probably occurred either later or not at all.