Professor John Doyle:

On EU funding, it is not the size of the cheque the EU might write. It might want to have a photo opportunity and hand over some money; I suspect it would.

If we look at the political change in central Europe, however, Lithuania is nowper capitaa wealthier country than the United Kingdom having gone from being one of the poorest places. Romania is now 77% of the EU average in terms of GDP per head of population. Moldova, which is the far side of an imaginary line in some ways with a very similar cultural and economic set-up, was one of the poorest places in central Europe. It was access to the EU markets over that extended period. Obviously, there was EU investment as well, but it was the market access. The cheques would not have made a difference. It was the access to the market that fundamentally transformed the central European economy with the particular forms and everything else that were there. However, the case of Moldova and Romania is interesting because the big difference between the two was that one had access to the market and the other did not, even though they are culturally and historically quite similar.