State Capacity and Deep Economic Integration: Evidence from the EU Eastern Enlargement
Prof. Dr. Nauro Campos, Brunel University London
The Great Recession and the Eurozone Crisis dented the shared understanding of the economic benefits from European Union (EU) membership. Economic research has strived to quantify these benefits but many of them have proven notoriously difficult to pinpoint (Crafts 2017). This paper argues that one of these potential benefits is the increase or the buildup of state capacity. We study which role economic integration, specifically the prospect of European Union (EU) membership, play in building the capacity of the state to uphold political and economic freedoms, enforce law and order, regulate economic activity, and provide public goods. By quantifying all progress towards accession reports (European Commission 2017), we generate a panel of new de jure (independence) and de facto (capacity) institutional measures for 17 European Union candidate countries yearly since 1997. They cover the judiciary, bureaucracy, and competition policy and include measures of potential inputs into each of these three areas. Our main finding is the identification of the relationship between judiciary capacity and bureaucratic independence as the key engine of the process of state capacity building engendered by the prospect of European Union membership.
About the speaker
Nauro F Campos is Professor of Economics at Brunel University London and Research Professor at ETH Zurich. His main fields of interest are political economy and European integration. He is also a Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT (Maastricht University), a Research Fellow at IZA-Bonn, a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the (Central) Bank of Finland, and a Senior Fellow of the ESRC Peer Review College. Previously he was a Fulbright Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, a McNamara Fellow at The World Bank, a CBS Fellow at University of Oxford, and a visiting professor at Sorbonne and Warwick. From 2009 to 2014, he was seconded as Senior Economic Advisor to the Chief Economist of the UK’s Department for International Development. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (Los Angeles) in 1997.
Venue: Conference room (0.16 & 0.17)
Date: 16 November 2017
Time: 12:00 - 13:00 CET
