The stability proof for economic Model Predictive Control (MPC) is in general difficult to establish. In, contrast, tracking MPC has well-established and practically applicable stability guarantees, but can yield poor closed-loop performance in terms-of the selected economic criterion. In this paper, we derive a formal procedure to design a tracking MPC scheme so as to locally approximate the behaviour of economic MPC. Given an economic stage cost, the desired tracking stage cost can therefore be computed automatically. Because tracking MPC guarantees stability of the closed-loop system, our procedure succeeds if and only if economic MPC is locally stabilising. This fact can be used to certify whether economic MPC is not stabilising. We illustrate the theoretical developments in a simulated example. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.