The European Dimension:The Single Market and the Structural Funds

Membership of the European Union has impacted on Ireland and the Irish economy in many ways. The primary focus of this chapter is on the impact of the Single Market process and the Structural Funds expenditure programmes To many readers is might appear strange that we have little to say on the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). There are two reasons for this. The first is that, as is clear from Chapter 1, agricultural output has not contributed to Ireland’s dramatically improved output performance over the course of the 1990s, while employment in agriculture has continued to fall. Since the present study is concerned with identifying the causes of the strong performance of the economy, we need not therefore linger too long on agriculture. (This is not to suggest of course that agriculture is unimportant, merely that it is tangential to the present study.) The second reason why we ignore the consequences of the CAP is that is it difficult to determine the alternative or baseline scenario against which these consequences are to be measured. Is it, for example, a situation where an equivalent degree of protection has to be funded by domestic taxpayers and consumers, or is it instead a free world market in agricultural products? Fortunately we do not have to consider this difficult question here.