Publicação
Economic determinants of the European Union's popularity
| Resumo: | The purpose this dissertation is to test the impact of macroeconomic outcomes on citizens’ support for the European integration process. Citizens’ support is vital for the European integration process mainly because without their support, national governments’ will not endorse increases in the levels of integration. In order to analyse the impact of the economic conditions on the European Union’s popularity at an aggregate level, a popularity function was estimated for a panel of the first fifteen EU members, between 1974 and 2008. To control for countries’ different characteristics at different levels, a fixed effects estimation method was used. The results indicate a negative impact of unemployment variations on EU’s citizen support for the EU, and a positive impact of the degree of openness of the economies and of the percentage of trade with other EU countries. There is also evidence of the existence of a honeymoon effect in the first three years of each countries EU membership, and of a decrease in citizens’ support for the EU as time in the Union increases. When the sample is split into different integration stages, econometric results suggest that significant departures of the economic variables from what citizens consider to be ‘acceptable’ levels increase the weight citizens attribute to them in their evaluations of the EU’s performance. These results can have important implications on the EU’s policies since they reveal which variables the EU should focus on when it considers increasing its integration levels |
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| Autores principais: | Nogueira, Carlos André da Silva Gama |
| Assunto: | European Union Popularity Economic performance Panel-data União Europeia Popularidade Performance económica Dados em painel |
| Ano: | 2010 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | dissertação de mestrado |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade do Minho |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho |
| Resumo: | The purpose this dissertation is to test the impact of macroeconomic outcomes on citizens’ support for the European integration process. Citizens’ support is vital for the European integration process mainly because without their support, national governments’ will not endorse increases in the levels of integration. In order to analyse the impact of the economic conditions on the European Union’s popularity at an aggregate level, a popularity function was estimated for a panel of the first fifteen EU members, between 1974 and 2008. To control for countries’ different characteristics at different levels, a fixed effects estimation method was used. The results indicate a negative impact of unemployment variations on EU’s citizen support for the EU, and a positive impact of the degree of openness of the economies and of the percentage of trade with other EU countries. There is also evidence of the existence of a honeymoon effect in the first three years of each countries EU membership, and of a decrease in citizens’ support for the EU as time in the Union increases. When the sample is split into different integration stages, econometric results suggest that significant departures of the economic variables from what citizens consider to be ‘acceptable’ levels increase the weight citizens attribute to them in their evaluations of the EU’s performance. These results can have important implications on the EU’s policies since they reveal which variables the EU should focus on when it considers increasing its integration levels |
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