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Strategies & Market Trends : Zeev's Turnips - No Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (21444)	1/12/2002 10:58:48 PM
From: Steve Lee	Respond to of 99280

See Kyros' post number 21442. In terms of your point on infrastructure for less developed EU countries, if you mean such things as roads and telephones then from what I have seen in Greece and Spain for example, these countries are benefitting massively. So while at home I drive on broken roads in queues, when I drive in Greece I have a vast expanse of tarmac to myself. When I first started going to Greece, the mains water was often switched off for several hours a day to conserve supplies; now the infrastructure is there to make that very rare - courtesy of the EU. Of course, a lot of this is good as it lets these countries reach the point where they can contribute to the European, and World, economies as a whole. However, so much of it disappears in corrupt activities. There is a project in Greece to register every piece of land in a database. It is way over budget and way under target. Now there are calls for resignations of ministers who are accused of corrupt links with the contractors providing the services. The missing amounts are measured in billions of US Dollars, according to the Greek press. That was EU (i.e. British) money of course. When you buck the market, you skew the supply/demand, the risk/reward, and the incentive/disincentive dynamics. That results in misallocation of capital. So you can have scandals but the people don't uprise, cos it is not their money being spent. And because the imbalances are across countries, most fo the populace don't notice. As for those of us who do, well, we just remove ourselves from the tax system. All perfectly legal - how else are the politicians supposed to survive?