Development Opportunities Offered at Sectoral Level by EU Enlargement

The effect of eastern enlargement will vary greatly between sectors of the Austrian economy, not least due to the current framework of trade policies. Trading with industrial products simply continues or completes the progress made by the process of liberalisation. Trends visible since the opening of the east will be continued or (moderately) enhanced. Trade in services, on the other hand, will experience considerable change through the impending integrative step. The freedom of establishment and new ways to render services across borders will create an entirely new competitive regime in some sectors. Nevertheless, differences in the legal framework will only explain differentiations in terms of how sectors are affected by the EU's enlargement. The extent to which positive or negative development potentials will follow for each of the sectors will ultimately depend on their competitive capacity. This contribution thus analyses the competitive position of the secondary and tertiary sectors broken down by sectoral details. To this end, sector characteristics were obtained from modern integration theory which should be the cause of variations in the development in the case of integration. Based on this and using multivariant cluster analyses, sectors were combined into groups which can be expected to have similar development potentials in the case of enlargement. The findings draw a basically positive picture both for the secondary and tertiary sectors. In manufacturing, 47 sectors, i.e., almost half of the 99 industries, show positive characteristics; another 17 sectors are in a neutral competitive position vis-à-vis the new competitors from the CEECs. Foreign trade will develop favourably across a wide range of sectors; and even sectors that are disadvantaged in theory are increasingly succeeding in their exports to Central and Eastern Europe. Similarly, positive expectations can be found for the services industries. Many of its sectors, such as data processing, financial services, real estate agents, much of wholesale trading and producer services, will be among the winners of enlargement. Only 18 of the 70 services sectors studied show negative characteristics. Unfortunately they include high-employment sectors such as construction, parts of retail trade and transport. Yet even for these sectors it has been shown that there are no grounds to fear any large-scale threat to domestic operations: the supply structure in the CEECs is full of gaps, and the level of efficiency shown by Austrian suppliers as well as the demand perspectives have a generally positive effect. In addition, the inclusion of (temporary) protective mechanisms for sensitive services sectors in the EU's negotiating position has taken the sting out of the problem that competition between border-crossing services will be biased by unequal competitive conditions. The transition periods thus created should be used for proactive preparatory measures.