Final Report Summary - ENEPO (EU Eastern Neighborhood: Economic Potential and Future Development) The main objective of the ENEPO project was to examine the potential of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) and EU strategic partnership with Russia to upgrade the relations between the enlarged EU and the new independent states (NIS) of the former USSR (called also CIS countries) in the spheres of trade, investment, labour movement, technical cooperation, and to speed up economic and governance reforms in NIS, with special attention given to mutual interdependence between these cooperation areas. Before starting the ENEPO project, a major research effort in the trade, investment and labour migration areas was concentrated on the economic integration of Central and Eastern Europe (including the Baltic countries) with the EU, leaving EU cooperation with NIS outside of the main stream of analysis. Moreover, with EU eastern enlargement, the geographical coverage of the potential research agenda has changed radically - instead of analysing the EU-15, the entire EU-27 should be analysed as the economic partner of the CIS states. In the governance sphere, a large body of research work focused on the post-communist transition of individual NIS and the CIS region as a whole, as well as cross-country and cross-regional comparative analyses. However, few studies attempted to analyse the role of the European integration process as the potentially most powerful factor determining success or failure in building a market economy and democratic society in the post-communist world. The same applied to the adoption of European economic, legal and political institutions by the NIS, their appropriateness to the development needs of the less-developed NIS and their potential to speed the transition and modernisation process. The ENEPO project, from its very beginning, was designed not only to advance the knowledge on EU-CIS economic and political relations and CIS development problems and challenges beyond the original state-of-the-art but also to help policy development and decisions of all parties involved (i.e. the EU, EU Member States and CIS countries). Individual work packages, studies and papers contain a lot of important policy conclusions and recommendations, the most important of which will be sum up below. In the area of economic development, there is a clear conclusion that all CIS countries must continue economic, institutional and political reforms because their transition to democratic and liberal market economy has not been completed yet. The 'gold' era of prosperity enjoyed in the first half and mid of 2000s weakened pro-reform incentives but the recent crisis shock brought back the importance of prudent macroeconomic policies, elimination of market distortions, better business and investment climate, better institutions and less corruption. And this seems to be impossible without reversing the authoritarian trend in many countries and advancing democratic reforms of political systems. The EU can help in this process in many ways: by promoting the so-called deep free trade agreements, liberalising movement of people, facilitating various forms of institutional learning, creating the right balance of incentives in political and institutional sphere, providing well-targeted and better governed technical assistance and other forms of development aid. The results of analyses conducted in several ENEPO work packages make clear that removing trade and economic cooperation barriers can bring substantial benefits to both sides but the bigger ones to the CIS economies (because of an asymmetry in their economic potentials, higher initial tariff and non-tariff barriers in CIS and relative backwardness of this region). However, it will happen only if the future free trade agreements will go beyond simple tariff reduction / elimination and will also involve elimination / reduction of non-tariff barriers, liberalisation of investment regimes and trade in services. Such broad-based 'deep' trade liberalisation will not only create a better market access of CIS exporters to the Single European Market but will also bring at least partial institutional harmonisation with EU acquis. And this will contribute to improving business and investment climate in CIS which, in turn, can improve long-term prospects of sustainable economic growth in the region, reducing its relative backwardness and, therefore, secure economic, social and political stability in the EU Eastern neighbourhood. The EU should support institutional harmonisation / transformation and help reducing its economic and social costs through various aid programs which would both facilitate and reward related political effort of individual neighbouring countries. In order to improve the incentive balance of the aid programs on both sides (including technical assistance), they should involve a certain degree of co-financing of recipient countries (following the experience of intra-EU structural funds and the Cohesion Fund). Trade liberalisation cannot fully progress without liberalisation in the movement of people. Freer travel opportunities will help to increase trade in services, and develop cooperation in many important areas such as education, science and culture, and speed up a process of institutional learning of market economy and democratic political system by CIS citizens, business and governments. This is also one of the potential 'carrots' which can substantially rebalance the ENP offer and make it more attractive for the CIS countries, even without an explicit promise of EU membership perspective. As minimum, it should involve a clearly defined perspective and conditions of visa-free travels (for short-term visitors) and more opportunities for legal labour migration (not only for a highest-skill labour) in exchange for closer cooperation of CIS countries with the EU in fighting illegal migration and in other areas of JHA policies. Widening a window for legal migration will also bring substantial benefits to the EU which will suffer labour deficit and increasing imbalances in the social welfare systems in a longer term, as the consequence of population ageing and the declining birth rate. In other sensitive area of EU-CIS cooperation, i.e. energy supply and transit, the focus should be given to market-oriented solutions on both sides, i.e. elimination of state-owned monopolistic suppliers, providers of transit services and purchasers / distributors of energy products, privatisation, opening sector to foreign investment, elimination of price and other market distortions, and quasi-fiscal operations related to energy sector, etc. Such measures could help to de-politicise this sector and eliminate various kinds of turbulences in energy supply caused by political factors. Overall, the results of ENEPO clearly speak in favour of the comprehensive, package-type market-oriented reforms, liberalisation and integration, as predicted at the stage of formulating project's hypotheses. The modern economy and contemporary integration processes have a complex and sophisticated character and cannot be reduced to just trade in goods (sometimes further limited to non-agriculture goods only) like it was half a century ago. They must also involve trade in services, free movement of capital and investments, and free movement of labour. This was the conceptual base on which the Single European Market and European Economic Area were built up successfully and this is the most economically promising interpretation of the 'a stake in the EU Internal Market' offer presented by the ENP Strategy Paper (ENP, 2004, p. 14). On the political front, the agenda of bilateral relations between the EU and individual CIS countries should be driven by the long-term integration and modernisation goals rather than short-term tactical considerations and involve more coordination of Members States policies on the Union's level. Documentos relacionados Final Report - ENEPO (EU Eastern Neighborhood: Economic Potential and Future Development)
