European Union enlargement and pollution: Why caution is necessary

The enlargement of the EU, at the current stage of its development, poses a particular challenge as the new members are likely to be even more heterogeneous than the existing ones, and at every new enlargement this problem is going to get worse. The field of environment is possibly going to be one of the most challenging areas in the new rounds of enlargements. The differences in environmental standards between Austria, Finland and Sweden on the one hand and the twelve existing members at the time of accession of the former three on the other are much narrower than that between the existing fifteen member countries and the new potential entrant countries from the Central European countries. The differences are huge both in terms of production technologies, abatement technologies, and relative concerns for environmental degradation etc. It is, therefore important to examine the potential effects of enlargement on global environment. The EU is aware of the difficulties and has accession strategies for the environment. However, in the academic literature one sees very little analysis of the issues involved. The purpose of this paper is to add a note of caution to the discussion on enlargement from an environmental point of view. By developing a stylised theoretical framework and carrying out numerical simulations, we show that enlargement can potentially increase total emission of a pollutant in the absence of appropriate actions prior to the accession of new members.