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If global GDP grew by 3 percent during those two centuries, the value of the world's output in 2200 will be $8 quadrillion ... But in present value terms, that stupendous sum would be worth just $10 billion. In other words, it would not make sense ... to spend any more than $10 billion ... today on a measure that would prevent the loss of the planet's entire output 200 years from now."

The ministry of finance forecasts a rise in the country's GDP from 59 percent to 70 percent of the European Union's output in 2005 comparable to Slovenia and far above Poland with a mere 40 percent. The Czech Republic is preparing itself to join the eurozone shortly after it becomes a member of the EU in May 2004. Foreign investors are gung ho.

This is why the tax burden and the government's share of GDP have been soaring inexorably with the consent of the citizenry. People adore government spending precisely because it is inefficient and distorts the proper allocation of economic resources. The vast majority of people are rent-seekers.

With one quarter of the labor force it produces less than 4 percent of GDP. But the peasants are well represented in the legislature and soaring unemployment almost one fifth of all adults makes every workplace count. In the meantime, the ten would-be new members of the EU have teamed up to present their case in Brussels.

A less sanguine Kenneth Rogoff, the IMF's new Chief Economist wrote in "The Economist" in April: "When countries run sustained current-account deficits up in the range of 4 and 5% of GDP, they eventually reverse, and the consequences, particularly in terms of the real exchange rate, can be quite significant." Rogoff alluded to the surreal appreciation of the dollar in the last few years.

In five years, US net obligations to the rest of the world will grow from one eighth of its GDP in 1997 to two fifths of a much larger product, according to Goldman Sachs. By 2006, a sum of $2 billion dollars per day would be required to cover this yawning shortfall.

Allocating three percent or less of GDP for defense could easily prove to be a ceiling and not a floor. It should be noted that in Europe, defense spending is closing in on 1 to 2 percent of GDP.

Slovenia's GDP per capita is 7 times Macedonia's. The economies of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary are light years removed from those of Yugoslavia or even Bulgaria. Nor do these countries attempt real integration.

With the GDP per capita of most candidates at one fifth the EU's, this would be a perverse, socially unsettling and politically explosive outcome. Aware of this, the European Commission denies any intention to actually accept cash from the candidates. Their net contributions would remain theoretical, it pledges implausibly.

An International Finance Discussion Paper released by the Fed in December 2000 found, as "The Economist" put it, that "deficits usually began to reverse when they exceeded 5% of GDP. And this adjustment was accompanied by an average fall in the nominal exchange rate of 40%, along with a sharp slowdown in GDP growth." Never before has the current account deficit continued to expand in a recession.