Dear All,
You are welcome to attend our next Tuesday seminar witth two prominent
speakers on very important topic.
Slavo Radosevic
This seminar represent voluntary activity and does not contravene AUT strike
action.
Centre for the Study of Economic and Social Change in Europe
www.ssees.ac.uk/csesce.htm,
Seminar Series, January – March 2006
Place: 16, Taviton Street, Room 431
Tuesday 16:30-18:00
March 7
Prof. Erik Reinert and Prof. Rainer Kattel
Tallinn University of Technology
“The Qualitative Shift in European Integration: Towards Permanent Wage
Pressures and a ‘Latin-Americanization’ of Europe?”
Why should you attend this seminar?
Daniel Gross and Alfred Steinherr (2004) Economic Transition in Central and
Eastern Europe. Planting the Seeds. CUP argue that:
(..) integration between similar economies should lead to more economic
gains than integration between similar economies .. the main result is that
the increase in world GDP is higher the greater the difference in
capital-labour ratios prior to integration. (…) the gain does not go only to
the CEEC. The present EU-15 also benefit and their gain is also an
increasing function of the initial difference in capital-labour ratios (…)
The fact that gains to CEEC are large without the transfers suggest that
both parties should de-emphasize the transfer aspect. It would be
regrettable if accession countries were excessively focused on the bonus
(transfers) rather than on the real benefits of EU membership – which are
integration in a vast market after graduation from ‘transition’ countries’
p. 291- 297
This textbook wisdom is challenged by our seminar speakers Prof. Reinert and
Prof. Kattel who argue that
‘(…) the European Union enlargement project is laudably idealistic. Whereas
the US does not absorb any of the social costs in the Mexican
deindustrialization of traditional industry and allows little (legal)
immigration, the European integrative model has the disadvantage of possibly
accruing very high costs on several counts. The large internal wage
differentials are likely to create strong downward pressures on the wage
level in the core countries, where the conflicts during the summer of 2004
may have been just preliminary skirmishes for a much larger battle to
follow. (…) The present integration of the European Union is clearly a
departure from the slow and careful Listian form of symmetrical integration
that characterized the growth of the European Common Market, starting in the
immediate post-war period’.
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