Understanding Questions of Regional Growth: Politics and Growth Management in Central and Eastern Europe.

This paper will address the impact of national and sectoral level economic interests on the development of national government policies to promote economic growth in Central and Eastern Europe. EU membership places the Central and East European countries before important dilemmas. For one, EU membership ultimately forces these countries to think more regionally or locally than was previously the case-in particular with respect to the use and administration of the EU's structural and cohesion funds. Despite the fact that these countries have been able to rely on more centralized control and administration of these funds for the period 2004-2006, the EU essentially requires that this policy be shifted to one of more decentralized control and administration for the next framework period 2007-2013. At the same time, however, it may well be possible to think of the crucial economic development concerns facing these countries as more explicitly national and/or global in character. In particular, these countries now stand before the requirement of consolidating the past decade of privatization, economic restructuring and foreign investments into more firmly embedded systems of economic production and technological development. At the same time, powerful forces are at work in the European Union to limit the degree of economic competition between East and West, potentially reducing the inflow of resources and restricting the nature and shape of the economic development tools these countries have at their disposal. This paper thus attempts to illuminate an important debate and emerging in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Europe over appropriate national level economic development tools and goals. This debate revolves around both centralized and regional control of the EU's structural and cohesion funds on the one hand, and the nature and shape of national-level economic development goals and their translation into industrial policy on the other. In important ways, this debate reinvigorates previous discussion of the North/South debate in Europe. The basic goal of this paper then is to outline the basic forces involved in the construction of national level economic policy-in particular in Hungary-and thereby to explain the basic shape and contour of emerging national strategies of economic development. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]