4 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 18.0 ms ] thread
good on them, they should have been members since the start (1957)
Of course, given the context and who produced the report, the message is appropriate.

> To create a model enabling them to calculate the benefits of EU membership, PIE used what is known as the synthetic control method, which assumes the creation of a counterfactual scenario based on the reproduction of the country under study from among countries with similar characteristics that remained outside of the EU.

Essentially shows the benefit of free trade and access to preferential trade agreement.

If Poland had a MFN with BRICS, they may have grown probably at a higher rate, who knows?

"Countries with similar characteristics that remained outside the EU" is quite unclear. It this implies countries in the region that could potentially join the list is now so limited and skewed towards what I would call "problem countries" that there are probably a massive bias to take into account. And that includes countries from other regions then it seems like a highly subjective comparison.

By population, the countries most similar to Poland are Ukraine, Morocco, and Uzbekistan... So, yes, Poland has done better than all of them. And?

This is always very much science fiction modelling...

The graph shows a difference between reality and their model of Poland outside the EU only from 2014 onwards (Poland joined the EU in 2004) so it would have been interesting to at least mention and discuss the significance of that date. [Edit: Ukraine is the country most similar to Poland in Europe in terms of population, if they compared Poland to Ukraine, 2014 is a significant date there (Dombass, Crimea, etc), obviously results will be stricking...]

> Among the eight eastern member states that joined in 2004, only Lithuania (60.3%) was found by PIE to have had a bigger premium from EU membership than Poland. They were followed by Latvia (32.2%), Slovakia (18.2%), Hungary (13.4%), the Czech Republic (8.4%), Estonia (0.4%) and Slovenia (0.1%)

These are widely varying estimates, from "massive difference" in one country to "no difference at all" to a neighbouring country. I suspect one could tweak the model or assumptions a little bit and get completely different results.