European Integration: the Impact of the Global Economic Crisis on the Catching-Up Process

The European Integration of the Central Eastern Europe countries (CEECs) is still a challenging issue. Firstly, the disparities of the per capita revenue between the CEECs and EU-15 can blame the feasibility of an enlarged Europe with homogeneous growth. Secondly, the global economic crisis is actually impacting their growth rates. The objective of this article is to test the existence of the catching-up process between the European countries. If real convergence is empirically checked, at which speed is it actually done? Thanks to the theoretical and empirical lessons, the β - convergence hypothesis is tested for the heterogeneous European panel data. In particular, the heterogeneity among the speeds of convergence contradicts the idea of the uniformity of the catching-up process in the Eastern Europe. Thus, the EU enlargement seems to lead to a "variable-speed Europe" of real convergence