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1 Suma Athreye, Can Huang and Luc Soete INTRODUCTION: EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND EMERGENCE OF INDIA AND CHINA IN A GLOBAL SETTING Economically, the last 50 years of European integration have brought about an unparalleled process of economic development, of social transformation and employment creation. Economic development in Europe has been spurred by the opening up of national markets and the harmonization, still incomplete in many sectors, of the European Single Market; by monetary and fiscal convergence with the introduction of the Growth and Stability Pact accompanying the introduction of the Euro; by regional cohesion policies with the transfer of substantial amounts of resources between member states towards less favored regions and countries, and by a series of subsequent enlargements making the European Union (EU) today the largest trading bloc in the world. At the same time though, the last 10-15 years have also been characterized by an unparalleled process of economic growth at the world level, in actual annual growth terms at a substantially higher percentage than that of the EU, and accompanied by a dramatic expansion of world trade and worldwide capital movements. Compared to the enlargement of the EU, the enlargement of the WTO with some of the large BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries has had by any measure a much greater impact on worldwide growth or, for that matter, EU growth. As Freeman (2005) put it, the entry of the BRIC countries in the world trade system has, given the size of their potential…. © European Union 2010.