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The European Union has launched the overall enlargement process with the ten Central and East European countries (CEEC), Malta, Cyprus, and Turkey.

The enlargement of the EU will naturally have considerable impacts on the candidate countries, on the current member states, but also on the third countries which have close trade linkages with the EU.

This long-term research program focuses on the short and long-run impacts of the EU enlargement. As it is stated in the Agenda 2000 document of the European Commission, assessing the impacts of enlargement on the EU and on the other regions is an extremely complex and hazardous task. There is a great degree of uncertainty on a number of important factors that will directly determine those impacts; indirect effects, which could be as important as direct ones, are even more difficult to estimate. The impacts of the enlargement will very much depend on the economic performance of the EU, on the economic performance of the candidate countries, but also of the other regions. Moreover, these impacts will as well depend on largely exogenous factors, such as the international environment, world agricultural and energy prices, on the timely implementation of the Union's new institutional arrangements, on the success of the European monetary union, and on the future form of the EU policies, in particular the Common Agricultural Policy, structural funds. It will also depend on the date and possible sequence of accessions, the effort deployed during the pre-accession period, and the nature and duration of any transitional measures after accessions.

Given the complexity of assessing the impact of enlargement, we need a coherent framework that can take all the fundamental direct and indirect sectoral and regional feedbacks into account. Multinational and multisectoral general equilibrium modeling provides such a useful framework. EcoMod fellows and associates are currently building a very detailed sectoral database for each one the candidate countries in order to extend the coverage of our intertemporal dynamic general equilibrium model to the candidate countries. The new version of the model will then be used for a detailed analysis of the implications of the EU enlargement.