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To: RockyBalboa who wrote (2624)	11/25/2007 12:03:17 PM
From: John Vosilla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71456

'Please, do a visit of the country side in slovakia, or hungary or come to romania, or to the eastern parts of Poland. Or go to belarus or the ukrajna. You will see unprecedented poverty particularly outside the cities and amongst older persons.' It seems a lot like in the US especially our rural communities in the south, rust belt and upstate NY... I have some family in eastern Europe and in Italy. They are doing better but those who want to get ahead and are young need to go to industrialized, urban areas usually farther north and west for the real opportunities..

To: RockyBalboa who wrote (2624)	11/25/2007 12:48:07 PM
From: critical_mass	Respond to of 71456

With regards to high tech, still employees are moved to Western Europe and not vice versa. I.T. has been moving east for years. In Germany, T-Systems, for example, has moved a lot of basic administration to Prague. After the staff has some experience, it is conceivable that more advanced tasks could be moved also. I have talked to people working for German or Austrian companies in which all the java programming or web development is done in Romania or Croatia. Poland has picked up a lot of back office too and according to this, Budapest is coming up also. search.ft.com As far as I know, there is still infrastructure to be built in Poland before things can be transported easily, e.g. the Autostrada2 crossing Poland east-west. en.wikipedia.org

To: RockyBalboa who wrote (2624)	11/25/2007 2:03:51 PM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 71456

I live in Denmark, and recent surveys have shown, that costs are not the main reason for IT companies to outsource to other countries - lack of skilled labor is more important. It's simply easier to hire enough skilled labor in other countries, so scalability can be a major reason to outsource. Also, for a Danish company, a factory in Lviv is simply closer to central Europe, than a local factory. So building a factory in Lviv means less transportation of products. With regard to manufacturing and food processing, I don't agree that this is where East Europe has its strengths. High tech manufacturing and high tech food processing is usually done in west Europe. In other words, just like in IT and other industries, east Europe usually provides low-tech products. For instance, east Europe is often not able to produce good cheese and Yoghurt, simply because they are not able to produce milk of sufficient quality. I wouldn't call this a "strength in food processing". Did you know that much of the food in Ukrainian supermarkets is imported? It's ridiculous, and I hope they start to learn how to do these kind of things themselves. It is not wrong, that seen from north Europe, France isn't so important. I live in the southern-most country in north Europe, and France comes in at a 7th place in both exports and imports, and counting the long term potential, they're even lower. France means much more to central/west European countries like Germany, Italy and UK. As far as I'm told by a businessman from France, one of their problems is, that it's almost impossible to fire people, and another is that people don't change jobs a lot - unlike Copenhagen, where employment time averages 2 years and where unemployment rate is lower than in USA (as a whole). I visit Ukraine regularly, and also get out of the cities, enjoying unspoiled nature where frogs are a noise nuisance and storks are on every corner. I fully agree, that people die early, but those that live, are generally at good health, simply because bad health means dying. Most old people in west Europe would simply die if they had to live under the conditions of Ukraine. I think we agree on this one - and I don't understand why you used the word "wrong" on this one. You may consider my statements a bit cynical, but if we're talking about retirement payments, Ukraine is not the country that has the biggest problems. There's a huge difference between the society costs for an obese old man living in a nursery home, getting expensive drugs and advanced medical treatment, and a babushka living in a Ukrainian village growing her own vegetables. The Obese man may be happier, but since we're talking about economic problems in the future, I'm quite sure that the Obese is quite an economic burden.