The EU has recently launched the European Neighbourhood Policy, aimed at fostering integration with countries located close to its borders. This article proposes a liberal intergovernmentalist framework for the analysis of Ukraine's prospects of integration with the EU and apply it to evaluate the main economic and political benefits and costs associated to three possible scenarios: free trade area, fully developed European Neighbourhood Policy and EU accession. Two main conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, gains from integration would be asymmetrically distributed and would mostly accrue to Ukraine, whilst the main obstacles to integration would not be economic, but political. Secondly, the European Neighbourhood Policy does not represent a credible long-term alternative to EU membership for Ukraine; thus the outcome of the integration process should probably consist either in the mere creation of a free trade area or in EU accession.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Modena and Reggio E., Faculty of Economics "Marco Biagi" in its series Department of Economics with number
0529.
Find related papers by JEL classification: F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration F59 - International Economics - - International Relations and International Political Economy - - - Other P16 - Economic Systems - - Capitalist Systems - - - Political Economy of Capitalism