Zusammenfassung:
This article examines the prospective Association Agreement between the Republic of San Marino and the European Union, focusing on the economic sustainability of regulatory convergence in a microstate context. While alignment with the EU acquis has strengthened supervisory credibility and financial stability, it has also imposed sizable fixed compliance costs on a small and highly open financial system. The article asks whether, and under what conditions, these costs can be offset by integration-related benefits once effective market access is activated. Thus, the article pursues two objectives. First, it provides a legal and institutional analysis of the reforms undertaken by San Marino in the financial sector as part of EU regulatory alignment. Second, it develops and applies an indicator-based quantitative framework that links regulatory compliance costs to potential market-access benefits. Using quarterly system-level balance-sheet data from the Central Bank of San Marino, the framework constructs a Regulatory Compliance Index (RCI), a Market Benefit Index (MBI), and their difference, the Integration Gap Index (IGI). At the end of the sample (2025Q2), the IGI appears to be positive, but moderate (approximately 0.08), indicating that compliance costs still exceed integration benefits. Scenario-based projections show that closing this gap within eight quarters requires an average quarterly increase in the MBI of about 0.01, a threshold already exceeded by recent observed dynamics (around 0.017-0.018). Under conservative and baseline scenarios, the IGI converges toward zero within two years, while an optimistic scenario implies faster convergence. The results suggest that regulatory convergence can be economically sustainable for San Marino, provided that effective EU market access materializes. The proposed framework intends to be transparent, replicable, and applicable to other microstates engaged in differentiated integration with the European Union.
