Suchergebnisse

Nowadays world economy is becoming more and more integrated due to regional integrations. Many economists, politicians argue about theeffectiveness of these regional integrations. The purpose of the research paper is to analyze the functions of these integrations, their goals,aims and the benefits for the member country. The research was conducted by several methods, the previous researches about the regionalintegrations issue were analyzed; the survey and interview were conducted. The result is that the membership of some influential and strongregional integration gives some benefits to the country; many countries have been developed and made impressive progress with the help ofregional integrations. But to conclude, behind the benefits there is politics on which the policy of international organizations and their actionsdepends. Sometimes a member country has to give up its independence and freedom of choice, it should act more carefully, because it is partof integration and has higher responsibility.

The aim of the present contribution is two-fold. First, we are going to briefly overview the theoretical arguments suggesting that regional economic integration may enhance the process of real economic convergence or catching up by less-advanced members of integration arrangements towards the development levels prevailing in more advanced member countries. Second, as an empirical test of the foregoing theoretical claims, we will embark on an analysis of actual economic growth paths of the present member countries of the enlarged European Union – both the 'old' (i.e. EU-15) and 'new' ones that is ten transition economies from East-Central Europe who joined the EU in 2004 or 2007, respectively (CEE-10 or EU-10). In particular, we will try to show that the process of regional integration in Europe tended as a rule to enhance the real economic convergence of income levels both within the EU-15 group as well as between the new (EU-10) and the old (EU-15) member countries.