The Vienna stock exchange is hoping to create a federation of financial markets in central Europe together with the Budapest stock market which it bought in June.
The head of the Hungarian stock exchange, Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, this week unveiled plans for the regional alliance when he said it would try to buy a major share in the Warsaw stock exchange, which is due to be privatised in early 2005.
"If the Vienna-Budapest-Warsaw triangle is established, it will draw the smaller financial markets of the region like a magnet," he said.
The Vienna stock exchange and Austrian-owned banks bought in June a 68 percent of the Budapest exchange, which showed strong growth early this year.
For Szalay-Berzeviczy, a regional network of stock markets will at the same time ensure the survival of the individual stock exchanges in central Europe, and their autonomy.
The region's financial markets, formed after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, have shown potential for strong growth but are struggling to fulfil their promise because of their size and small transaction volumes.
The total capitalisation volume of the markets in Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana, Prague and Warsaw is still less than that of the Athens stock exchange.
Their transaction volumes barely come to two percent of that of Euronext, the western European exchange that was formed by the merger of the markets in Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon and Paris.
The head of the Warsaw stock exchange, Wieslaw Rozlucki, told AFP last year that he thought that an alliance of central European markets was "inevitable", be it with a big western European exchange, such as Euronext or the stock exchanges of London or Frankfurt.
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