15 Years of Austrian EU Membership

Austria's 15-year EU membership has been a success story. It gave Austria an additional growth impulse of 0.6 percentage points and facilitated the creation of 14,000 new jobs. The main difficulty in estimating these integration effects consists in taking account of several simultaneous events: after the political upheaval of 1989 and the opening of Eastern Europe new sales opportunities emerged for Austrian exporters. At the same time EU integration deepened further. After the Single European Market the monetary union with a common currency was created. Finally the EU was enlarged to 27 member counties. In total for all integration steps since 1989 (Opening of Eastern Europe, EU accession, participation in EMU, EU enlargement) the integration bonus in Austria amounts to an additional real GDP growth of 0.9 percentage points per year and the creation of an additional 20,000 new jobs.