Cyprus Tops The League Of EU Applicants

by Lorys Charalambous, Tax-news.com, Cyprus

17 August 2001

The EU's Eurostat service has reported on GDP growth in the thirteen countries in the Union's waiting room in 2000. Cyprus has the highest GDP of the applicant countries with 82% of the EU's average GDP per head.

The report says that there was a renewed surge in growth in the Candidate Countries (CC-13) in 2000. The GDP of the CC-13 countries as a whole, after standing still in 1999, went up by 5.0% at constant prices in 2000. The increases ranged between +1.6% in Romania and +7.2% in Turkey.

In terms of purchasing power standards (PPS), per capita GDP was highest in 2000 in Cyprus (82% of the EU average) and Slovenia (71%), i.e. close to or even above the figures for Greece (68%), Portugal (74%) and Spain (81%), the Member States with the lowest figures for per capita GDP. In the other Candidate Countries, the figures for GDP per capita ranged between 24% of the EU average in Bulgaria and 58% of the average in the Czech Republic.

Economic growth in the Candidate Countries averaged 5.0% in 2000, above the EU figure of 3.3%. In 1999 five of the 13 Candidate Countries had recorded negative growth rates but in 2000 the rates were positive in every country.

Together, the CC-13 countries achieved a total GDP figure of EUR 624 billion in 2000, or 7.3% of the figure for the EU. In terms of PPS, however, the GDP of the Candidate Countries amounted to 16% of Community GDP.

Turkey, which accounts for a third of the Candidate Countries' total GDP, recorded the strongest growth (+7.2%), which followed the downturn in 1999 (-4.7%). After Turkey, the strongest performances in 2000 came from Latvia (+6.6%), Estonia (+6.4%) and Bulgaria (+5.8%). Poland, which accounts for a quarter of the Candidate Countries' GDP, repeated its solid performance of 1999 (+4.1%) with another good performance in 2000 (+4.0%). The lowest growth rates occurred in Romania (+1.6%), Slovakia (+2.2%) and the Czech Republic (+3.1%).

In terms of PPS, per capita GDP in the CC-13 countries was 35% of the EU figure. In five Candidate Countries the figure was more than half the EU average: Cyprus (82%), Slovenia (71%), the Czech Republic (58%), Malta (53%) and Hungary (52%). At the other extreme, there were five countries where GDP per capita was less than 30% of the EU figure: Bulgaria (24%), Romania (27%) and Turkey, Latvia and Lithuania (each 29%).

Between 1996 and 2000 the biggest increases in GDP per capita in relation to the EU average occured in Hungary (from 46% to 52%), as well as in Slovenia (from 66% to 71%), Estonia (from 33% to 37%) and Latvia (from 25% to 29%). The biggest reductions were in the Czech Republic (from 65% to 58%) and Romania (from 33% to 27%).

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