after the program (second difference)<sup>3</sup> . See Ravallion (2009) for a discussion of commonly used evaluation techniques<sup>4</sup> .

This study is organized as follows. The following section introduces the economic environment of the Eastern European Union Industrial firms and the existing overdraft facility policy schemes. Section 3 briefly explains the methodologies of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Frontiers (with Bootstrap procedure) and propensity score matching. Section 4 describes the data and it presents the key descriptive statistics. The empirical results are discussed in Sect. 5. The final section summarizes and concludes this study.

# **2 Background**

# 2.1 The Eastern European Union Companies

The EU enlargement to 27 countries in 2004 and 2007 constitutes a historical benchmark in the forming of the European space. In contrast to previous enlargements, the entering of Eastern European countries has peculiar characteristics due to the large number of nations entering the EU and due to the heterogeneity in its parameters and levels of development (Hay, 2003: 13).

Although the Eastern European countries have the common trait of their recent history linked to the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, their entry into the European club required the compliance of three conditions: democratic institutions, a market economy capable of insertion in a competitive world and the capacity to take on the Union‘s goals. These conditions were an important impulse to leave that common trait behind and, to a certain extent, have allowed differentiating the strengths and weaknesses of each country.

On the other hand, one must emphasize that this important enlargement in terms of numbers did not maintain a proportional relation with its economic relevance. Comparing the UE15 (2004) and taking into account data of that year, the contribution in population of the Eastern European nations is of about 100 million inhabitants, which translated into a 28% increase in the EU population whereas in added terms, the increase in GDP was of nearly 7%, emphasizing Poland‘s contribution of 42.7% of that value (Alcalá, 2004: 144).

In terms of rent per capita, the set of the countries of Eastern Europe was placed in 2004 in 4,380 Euros (current exchange rates) and 9,100 (PPP) Euros, respectively, which supposed 20% and 40% of the per capita income in the Europe of the fifteen. By countries the issue was somewhat different: in the case of Rumania the number in PPP was of 24% whereas in Hungary the per capita income was almost a 70% of the EU15. All this put into evidence the retard of these countries, but mainly the effort (with a very high degree of heterogeneity) needed to obtain the much desired real convergence of the EU27.

Another trait to consider is the characteristic of its productive structure: in the countries of the enlargement, more than 20% of the population was occupied in the agricultural sector whereas in the EU15 that percentile was of 4.8%. Among the countries one can highlight are Romania (40%), Bulgaria (28%) and Poland (26%). As far as foreign trade is concerned, the entailment of the 12 countries with the EU15 (exports and imports) approximately reached 60% of its trade balance whereas for the EU15 that value remains below 2.5% (Alcalá, 2004).

> 3 Randomization, was not possible either since the treatment group was not randomly selected.

> 4 Ravallion, M. (1999: ―The Mystery of the Vanishing Benefits: Ms. Speedy Analyst's Introduction to Evaluation‖. Policy Research Working Paper 2153, World Bank, Development Economics Research Group, Washington, D.C.

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