Alternative Scenarios for Hungary 's Accession and Macroeconomic Development

The aim of the research was to investigate likely macroeconomic developments in Hungary through 2010, based on two distinct scenarios: one that assumes accession for Hungary to the EU in 2005, and another that assumes the country will not accede to the EU before 2010 (the status quo scenario). The paper presents the specificities and main patterns of macroeconomic development in Hungary since the start of the transition. Section 2 is devoted to the analysis of the existing calculations for country's potential growth in the long run as well as to the likely development of the main factors of growth. In order to delineate the framework of the projections section 3 deals with two crucial topics: the characteristics of foreign economic relations and savings. The next section begins with the general evaluation of the likely impacts of accession on the Central and East European Countries (CEECs) as new EU members and goes on presenting the scenario projections for Hungary .