The European Union is now a market of 455 million people, more than half again the size of the United States, putting the EU third behind China and India.

With a comparable 2003 gross domestic product of 9.746 trillion euros (11.7 trillion dollars) according to the EU's statistics unit Eurostat, the union now rivals the US as the world's largest economy, though the latter is growing faster.

The 10 new EU members -- Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia -- have added 20 percent to the bloc's population, but only five percent to GDP.

Their economies are nonetheless forecast to grow by an average 4.0 percent this year, more than twice the 1.7 percent estimate for previous EU members, and the new states hope to follow the Irish "Celtic Tiger" in using union development funds to catch up with the pack.

Eight of the countries are former communist countries, and the 15 years of painful restructuring they have gone through to join the European Union has in turn drawn foreign direct investment of 126 billion dollars between 1993 and 2002.

The leaner economic models should help maintain investment rates, which have weakened recently but are forecast to increase by 5.75 percent this year and by 7.25 percent in 2005.

That should spur EU growth, and could also come at the expense of the United States, which must continue to attract massive amounts of foreign investment to fund its record budget and current account deficits.

European enlargement has resulted in another fundamental change.

The EU now shares a common border with Russia and is becoming a dominant factor in Moscow's economic calculations.

The Wall Street Journal quoted President Vladimir Putin's special EU advisor Sergei Yastrzhembsky last week as saying the EU will account for 53 percent of Russia's foreign trade and a third of foreign direct investment, in both cases more than the United States.