On 1 January, 2007, Romania will reach the end of a road that has proved a much greater struggle than experienced by many of its ex-Communist counterparts become a full member of the European Union (EU) – it will become a full member of the EU.
Unlike some of its Central and Eastern European neighbours, such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, which emerged from Communism with relatively strong infrastructure and industrial bases, the disastrous economic policies of the Communist Ceaucescu regime and ongoing political stasis after his fall in 1989 meant that the country was much slower to develop in the 1990s, a situation compounded by high levels of corruption and a legal system that acted as a deterrent to foreign investors.
