For additional information contact:
Mark Ambler, Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Tel. +44 20 7213 1591
Giedrius Čiupaila, Marketing & Communications Co-ordinator, PricewaterhouseCoopers
Tel. +370 (5) 239 2300; E-mail: giedrius.ciupaila@lt.pwc.com
26 November 2002
PricewaterhouseCoopers has released its 2002 enlargement barometer, which measures how well the accession candidates compare with the existing EU-15 countries on a range of economic indicators that underpin the four Copenhagen accession criteria. In this ranking of countries, Lithuania is tenth out of 13 accession candidates.
With the EU having just announced the conclusion of the accession negotiations with 10 of the 13 candidate countries by the end of the year, the 2002 barometer is a timely chance to assess the economic progress that each of the candidate countries has made and to examine how close these countries are to "converging" their economies with the existing countries of the EU.
The key findings from this year's barometer are:
- A gap still remains between all the candidate countries and the existing EU (with the exception of Slovenia)
- The gap between the economies of the "first ten" countries and the EU has narrowed over the last four years but not significantly
- The three other countries (Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey) are falling behind the "first ten" candidate countries in catching up with the EU.
Cameron G. Greaves, Senior Partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Lithuania, says:
"The EU enlargement barometer has been compiled using data for 2001. In most cases this is the latest available information. This does not of course reflect the progress made by Lithuania and other accession candidates in 2002. It does however recognise that the convergence between the ten prospective new member states - and this includes Lithuania - and the EU-15 has been strongest in the areas of macroeconomic stability and economic integration. We therefore hope that this convergence of the economies will continue to accelerate."
The EU enlargement barometer has been calculated on the basis of four components, each of which includes a number of economic indicators, namely:
- Macro-economic stability (long-term GDP growth, inflation, unemployment etc.)
- Economic structure (GDP per head and importance of agriculture in GDP)
- Infrastructure (telephones mainlines per capita, mobile phones per capita, internet users per capita etc.), and
- Economic integration with the EU (exports to the EU, imports from the EU and inward FDI stock per capita).
Click here for a copy of the barometer with full findings (255k).
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