The Adoption of the Acquis Communautaire as the Basis

Full adoption of the acquis was the prerequisite for an applicant’s successful accession to the EU (Schimmelfennig 2001: 59). Before any of the CEEC-10 could effectively complete the accession negotiations each of 31 chapters had to be officially closed by the responsible Commission’s ‘Directorate-General Enlargement’. Depending on the individual progress of transition, the dates of the opening of the chapters significantly differed across countries. Advanced countries, i.e. Hungary or Estonia, were granted much earlier opening dates than the laggards, i.e. the Slovak Republic. Of the 31 chapters, four explicitly refer to progress in infrastructure reform: competition, transport, energy and telecom and IT (Table 4.1).¹⁴³

In order to identify the main elements of the acquis that had to be adopted by the CEECs in the field of network infrastructures, it is helpful to take a closer look at the individual chapters. Chapter 6 covered ‘Competition Policy’ which unfolds cross-sectoral effects. The competition acquis is based on Article 31 (state monopolies of a commercial character), Articles 81-85 (rules applicable to undertakings), Article 86 (public undertakings and undertakings with special or exclusive rights) and Articles 87-89 (rules applicable to state aid) of the Treaty, as well as Articles 65 and 66 of the ECSC Treaty.¹⁴⁴ The control of mergers is executed on the basis of the Merger Regulation 4064/89

143 The overview reveals a relatively large variation across countries and sectors as regards the time that has elapsed between the opening and the closure of a chapter. Negotiations concerning the competition chapter turned out as a rather difficult and lengthy process. While the transport chapter caused the lengthiest process, the chapter on telecommunications was closed within one year or even less after its opening.

144 The treaty establishing the ‘European Coal and Steel Community’. It expired in 2002.

(European Council 1989). Parts of the acquis in the field of state aid are addressed under other chapters, namely Agriculture, Fisheries and Transport Policy.¹⁴⁵

Table 4.1: Opening and Closure of the Accession Chapters

Country Chapter 6

Notes: Situation as of December 2004. Dates refer to opening and provisional closure of chapters. With the eight new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe the chapters were officially closed in December 2002.

Source: European Commission (2004a); own research.

Chapter 9 covered the area of ‘Transport Policy’. In the transport sector the candidate countries face the challenge of transposing and implementing a substantial body of law, which represents about 10 per cent of the entire acquis communautaire. The acquis of chapter 9 is based on Articles 70-80 ECT. The transport acquis consists mainly of Secondary legislation, i.e. several hundred Regulations, Directives and Decisions.

Implementing the latter does therefore require an adequate level of administrative capacity.

In aviation, the major issues have been market access, safety and infrastructure

145 In assessing if the candidate countries can comply with the competition acquis and withstand the pressures of the internal market resulting from the full application of this acquis, the Commission examined whether undertakings operating in the candidate countries are accustomed to operating in an environment such as that of the Community.

organization. Across all sectors there is an economic need to promote, develop and upgrade the transport infrastructure in the candidate countries, with financial assistance from the EU. Today after enlargement, the transport infrastructures of the CEECs form part of a larger Trans-European network.

Reform developments in ‘Energy’ are treated in chapter 14. As the largest importer and as the second largest consumer in the world, the EU is a key actor on the international energy market.¹⁴⁶ It was assumed that Eastern enlargement will reinforce this trend, despite the fact that some candidate countries own significant energy resources, i.e. Polish coal and Romanian oil and gas. The energy acquis represents the body of all energy related EU law, regulations and policies. According to the acquis, the candidate countries were required to prepare for the internal energy market by implementing the gas and electricity Directives and to improve energy networks in order to create a functioning European market. As in other sectors, the acquis also demanded the existence of institutions that safeguard market reform, i.e. NRAs as required in the electricity and gas Directives.

Finally, chapter 19 refers to the acquis in ‘Telecommunications and IT’. As outlined above, the EU established its policy in the telecommunications sector as a result of rapid technological development in combination with a landmark decision by the ECJ, confirming that the sector was subject to the competition rules of the Treaty. The telecommunications acquis was updated with the adoption of the new CRF in February 2002, and all CEECs were required to transpose and apply this modified legislation by the time they wanted to become full members of the EU. Implementing the acquis required a removal of any conflict of interests through the effective separation of regulatory responsibilities from operational interests. This includes the establishment of a NRA for telecommunications and a separation of policy- and law-making authorities from property ownership.

All of the above mentioned chapters have been closed with the eight new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe by December 2002. With Bulgaria and

146 The EU is dependent on imports for half of its supplies. However, this dependence could even reach 70 per cent for natural gas, 90 per cent for oil and for 100 per cent for coal by the year 2030.

Romania, all chapters had at least been provisionally closed by December 2004. Basically, immediate repercussions on national law cannot be expected from the closure of chapters.

The acquis itself needs to be approved in the national arena through implementation measures and the adaptation of structures. In addition, the negotiations on the individual chapters are a supranational process in which both sides have a motivation to keep chapters open so that compromises can be reached also across policy fields when concluding the negotiations (Hölscher and Stephan 2004: 326-327).¹⁴⁷

147 These package deals are facilitated by the fact that issues raised in different chapters are often interlinked, i.e. as regards competition policy which unfolds a horizontal and a sector-specific effect.

5. Infrastructure Regulation in Central and Eastern Europe in the Light of Transition

In the old EU countries the process of regulatory reform has so far taken place in an environment characterized by functioning market economies which are framed by institutions that safeguard private property and free transactions among market participants. The CEEC-10, in contrast, had been shaped by the doctrine of Socialism and Communism which emphasized communal ownership and state control for forty years after World War II. Hence, in order to understand the developments of regulatory reform in these countries, we need to take into account their specific situation at the beginning of the general transition process. The transition of these countries from CPEs to market economies has developed a logic of its own in which efforts to reform the regulatory setting of network infrastructures was naturally embedded.

Most CEECs have demonstrated a remarkable economic performance over the past 15 years. Table 5.1 shows that the average GDP growth rate for the CEEC-10 in the time period between 1995 and 2003 was 3.7 per cent. In comparison, the average growth rate of the EU-15 for that time period was 2.2 per cent (OECD 2003). Of the ten countries Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia showed positive growth rates for the entire observation period.¹⁴⁸ The countries of the Luxembourg Group (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia) had an average growth rate of 3.8 per cent and the CEECs of the Helsinki Group (Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovak Republic) of 3.5 per cent. The fastest growing country among the CEEC-10 was Latvia with an annual growth rate of more than 5.2 per cent. The laggards among the CEEC-10 are the two applicant countries: Bulgaria with an average growth rate of 1.4 per cent, followed by Romania with 1.8 per cent.

148 Except for Latvia in 1990 and Poland in 1992, all CEEC-10 had negative growth rates in the first three years of transition. This is not surprising, however, since economic activities in the CPEs were kept on an artificially high level through excessive public investments which created huge budget deficits.

Table 5.1 Economic Growth CEEC-10 (1995-2003)

Country 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 Avg.

BUL 2.9 -9.4 -5.6 4.0 2.3 5.4 4.0 4.8 4.5 1.4

CZE 5.9 4.3 -0.8 -1.0 0.5 3.3 3.1 2.0 2.9 2.2

EST 4.3 3.9 9.8 4.6 -0.6 7.3 6.5 6.0 4.7 5.2

HUN 1.5 1.3 4.6 4.9 4.2 5.2 3.7 3.3 2.9 3.5

LAT -0.9 3.7 8.4 4.8 2.8 6.8 7.9 6.1 7.5 5.2

LIT 3.3 4.7 7.0 7.3 -1.8 4.0 6.5 6.8 8.9 5.2

POL 7.0 6.0 6.8 4.8 4.1 4.0 1.0 1.4 3.7 4.3

ROM 7.1 4.0 -6.1 -4.8 -1.2 1.8 5.3 4.9 4.9 1.8

SLK 6.5 5.8 5.6 4.0 1.3 2.2 3.3 4.4 4.2 4.1

SLO 4.9 3.5 4.6 3.8 5.2 4.6 3.0 2.9 2.3 3.9

Unweighted Average CEEC-10

4.3 2.8 3.4 3.2 1.7 4.5 4.4 4.3 4.7 3.7

Note: Figures denote percentages of real GDP Source: EBRD (2004)

Between 1995 and 2002, general government expenditure across the CEEC-10 decreased by 1.6 percentage points and is now in average at 41.4 per cent of GDP (Table 5.2). This is a significantly smaller reduction than in the EU-15 where general government expenditure decreased by 3.4 percentage points over the same time period (OECD 2003). Again, Hungary showed a remarkable performance with a decrease in government expenditure by 9.6 percentage points between 1995 and 2002. Only three countries, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic and Slovakia increased government expenditure over that time period.

Table 5.2 Government Expenditure CEEC-10 (1995-2002)

Country 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 Change (in %)

BUL 41.3 42.0 33.1 37.0 39.6 39.7 38.6 37.2 -4.1

CZE 44.1 42.2 41.7 40.9 41.9 43.7 44.2 46.6 2.5

EST 41.5 40.5 37.6 40.5 43.2 38.5 37.0 38.4 -3.1

HUN 52.6 48.8 49.5 50.4 44.8 47.1 51.9 53.5 0.9

LAT 41.5 39.5 41.0 43.3 44.1 42.0 37.2 38.8 -2.7

LIT 36.8 34.2 33.5 37.6 40.3 33.6 31.7 31.4 -5.4

POL 49.2 46.4 45.8 42.7 42.8 41.7 43.6 44.1 5.1

ROM 34.7 33.8 34.0 34.7 35.2 34.8 33.4 32.7 -2.0

SLK 45.2 47.0 45.5 42.9 43.3 45.4 47.7 48.4 3.2

SLO 43.4 42.9 43.8 44.4 44.5 42.2 42.6 42.6 -0.8

Unweighted Average CEEC-10

43.0 41.7 40.6 41.4 42.0 40.9 40.8 41.4 -1.6

Note: Figures denote percentages of real GDP; general government expenditure includes net lending.

Source: EBRD (2003)

A third indicator for economic development is the level of Foreign Direct Development, which “is at the forefront of economic policy decisions in the CEECs, as it is expected to accelerate enterprise restructuring and aid in successful transition to a market economy” (Barrell and Holland 2000: 477). FDI has risen sharply over the past decade, demonstrating the growing attractiveness of the transition countries for foreign investors (Table 5.3). Total FDI in the CEEC-10 increased by almost 130 per cent between 1995 and 2002. There was an extraordinary rise between 1997 and 1998, when FDI increased by 65 per cent. The three largest countries have naturally received the highest amount of net inflows in the balance of payments. However, while in the Czech Republic and Poland the FDI inflows have significantly increased since 1995, Hungary has experienced a sharp decline in foreign investments and even recorded a net outflow in 2003. As regards cumulative FDI inflows per capita, the Czech Republic with 3.709 US Dollars and Estonia with 2.362 US Dollars were the most attractive CEECs for foreign investors between 1989 and 2003. Again, Romania and Bulgaria are among the laggards

with the lowest and second lowest level of cumulated per capita inflows between 1989 and 2003, respectively. However, just recently, FDI has significantly increased in Bulgaria which recorded a net per capita inflow of almost 170 US Dollars in 2003.

Table 5.3 Foreign Direct Investment CEEC-10 (1995-2003)

Country 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

∑ per capita

1989-2003

BUL 98 138 507 537 789 1.003 641 876 1.341 775

CZE 2.526 1.276 1.275 3.591 6.234 4.943 5.476 8.276 2.351 3.709

EST 199 111 130 574 222 324 343 153 688 2.362

HUN 4.410 2.279 1.741 1.555 1.720 1.123 2.255 598 -1.647 2.089

LAT 245 379 515 303 331 400 151 388 289 1.435

LIT 72 152 328 921 478 375 439 714 467 1.163

POL 1.134 2.741 3.041 4.966 6.348 8.171 6.928 3.789 3.675 1.105

ROM 417 415 1.267 2.079 1.025 1.051 1.154 1.080 1.539 486

SLK 194 199 84 374 701 2.058 1.460 4.007 481 1.873

SLO 161 167 303 221 59 71 371 1.748 -120 1.646

Total

CEEC-10 9.456 7.857 9.191 15.121 17.907 19.519 19.218 21.629 9.064 1.664

Note: All figures are million US Dollars; per capita figures are US Dollars.

Source: EBRD (2004)

These macroeconomic indicators show that in average the transition countries have made remarkable economic progress. However, we still find significant differences across countries, especially in terms of international competitiveness. This becomes evident if we look at the cumulated FDI per capita inflow. In addition to productivity and wage level, the political environment and infrastructure conditions are factors that determine the investment attractiveness of a country. Thus, in order to make themselves interesting for foreign capital, transition countries needed not only to restructure their big industries; even more fundamentally, they had to restructure the political and judicial system as well as their infrastructure regimes in order to offer favourable investment conditions and establish

credibility. Cross-national differences in reform achievements along these dimensions should therefore be able to explain a good deal of variation in the levels of FDI inflow.

Although the enlargement process seems to have impacted significantly on reforms in the CEECs through the Europeanization of national policies, with regard to the general transition process it is instructive to take a closer look at the domestic situation in these countries. The transition process in the CEECs did not only involve a quantitative reduction of state action but also a qualitative redefinition of governmental intervention. It constituted a ‘revolution from above’ that set out to create the political and economic institutions of a market economy from scratch. Contrary to mere state retreat, such a general transition called for an active role of the government, albeit under different conditions than under former Communist rule.¹⁴⁹ We can only capture the process of infrastructure reform if we get to understand the characteristics and peculiarities of the transition process that has started in the CEECs after 1989/90. This includes the general political and economic conditions in which the reforms were embedded.

Im Dokument The Regulation of Network Infrastructures in the New European Union (Seite 164-172)