Investment Creation and Investment Diversion: Simulation Analysis of the Single Market Programme

This paper studies the investment creation and investment diversion effects of the EU's Single Market programme (EU92). We find suggestive, but not conclusive, evidence indicating that EU92 may have led to investment diversion in the economies of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and investment creation in the EU economies. We argue that a simple mechanism, based on the derived demand for capital can account for this. Discriminatory liberalization shifts production from excluded countries to the integrating region. Since EU92 focused on tradable sectors and these are capital intensive, the production shifting raises the rental rate in the integrating regions, lowering it elsewhere. This leads to investment creation and diversion. Results from our simulations show that investment diversion does occur for the EFTA6 (namely, the EFTA6 steady-state capital stock drops by two-thirds of a percent) when the EU's liberalization (EU92) involves market integration in addition to real trade cost reduction. When EU92 is extended to include the EFTA6, EFTA6 capital stocks rise by almost 5%. In terms of real income, the difference between the EFTA6-included and EFTA6-excluded cases is quite large for the EFTAns amounting to 5.5% of GDP. In all cases, the EU experiences investment creation (equal to approximately one-fifth of a percent of their initial capital stock) and real income gains (equal to 1.75% of GDP). The effects on the United States and Japan are trivially small, but mostly negative in terms of capital stocks and real income.