EU membership has many benefits, but economic growth is not one of them - new findings
In an article for The Conversation SDU Professors Thomas Barnebeck Andersen and Pieter Vanhuysse present the results from a joint study with researcher Mikkel Barslund. Their study examined whether joining the EU had benefits in growth - with ambiguous results.
"We compared the growth of the EU to the US and to comparably wealthy OECD countries outside the EU. We compared the growth of former Soviet satellites inside and outside the EU, and also looked at growth in different countries within the EU. At the end of the day, we were unable to demonstrate the presence of a clear-cut membership growth premium: the EU bloc performed roughly comparably to countries on the outside, and in certain cases worse."