Introduction

The four countries analyzed in this chapter have valuable lessons to share with the ten accession countries of 2004. Each of them entered the EU when it was very poor relative to the existing membership; each had to make sweeping changes in domestic institutions to be accepted into the EU; and each has become much better off economically over time, but in quite different ways. Their separate routes toward eventual prosperity and accommodation with the institutions of the EU provide useful insights for subsequent entrants, which are analyzed in chapter 19. Figure 18.1 shows that the course of each latecomer was erratic, to say the least.

Despite their common exclusion from the original make-up of the European Economic Community, all four countries experienced rapid rates of GDP expansion during the golden age of economic growth, from 1960 to 1973. Ireland stood out, however, with the slowest-growing economy among the four. Its per capita income declined from the level of Spain to that of Portugal before it joined the EEC, along with the United Kingdom and Denmark, in 1973. Thereafter, Ireland's growth performance improved, but it did not regain its leadership among the four until the mid-1990s. This was the result of a marked acceleration in its growth rates in the late 1980s, the result not of improved adaptation to the EU's acquis communautaire but, rather, of a radical change in domestic economic policy.