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Convergence of transition countries will have an impact on their external competitiveness. However, small open economies can grow faster than their partners without being constrained by the balance of payments if they succeed in increasing the supply of differentiated goods produced domestically (variety effect). This will require extensive economic restructuring as production is still largely focused on homogeneous goods with little differentiation and business density is significantly lower than in Western Europe. This paper introduces a simple open-economy model that can account for these stylised facts of transition and provides numerical simulations to evaluate the potential impact of the economic restructuring process on employment, production and start-up costs for new businesses.