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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (44354)	12/26/2008 7:00:28 AM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 217818

Comparing Ukraine with west Europe, it becomes obvious why there is a huge difference in wage levels. In Ukraine, there is a total lack of long term planning and skills and good mind set. It will take another 10-20 years to create role models for the youth, and then another 20-30 years before the next generation starts taking charge of things. Currently, they cannot coordinate road construction and the level of the economy is so low, that they use their own human faeces as fertilizer. They are still far from being able to produce food for themselves for money and their methods for conserving food is more interesting than going into a stone age museum. They only survive because most families grow their own food. They're afraid of using cars (they're unsafe and if things go wrong, not much help is available), public transport is considered "unhealthy" because of spreading of germs, and if you want to give birth to a child, you move back to the mother's parent's village and give birth at home. This is the state of 2009, 20 years after the Berlin wall broke. I usually say that the Ukrainian health situation is really good, because ill people don't survive for very long, and old people get a lot of exercise. If you want to donate to charity, find a Ukrainian without legs. Ukraine has seen a lot of growth lately. Basically, they can think and share a lot of culture with west Europe. But most of the growth has been with low-skilled work and guest working somewhere else. Now, with the financial collapse, unemployment rises quickly. Ukrainians are not used to invest in themselves, and don't consider higher educations worth a lot - many people have it, but don't know where to use it, because nobody seems to find a good match between a work that pays, and their education. It still pays more to drive a vehicle than to be a surgeon. Market economy thinking is not strong, because most of the economy is still ruled by government laws that don't make much sense and change frequently. You cannot buy land, but several politicians own land. Contradictory? No, it's Ukrainian logic and the population hates it - but they don't know what to do. All leading politicians learned their basics under communism. They got to the top by knowing how to navigate a communist society. Will west Europe invest in Ukraine? Yes. It is a huge resource of cheap and intelligent workers, which cannot get paid much more because they lack skills. However, it takes more than 30 years to make Ukrainians skilled. They need to learn to value knowledge, respect intellectual property, hard work, they need to learn to solve problems that arise, instead of just keeping them around etc. But the biggest problem: They need to learn to trust people outside their own families for business purposes. Right now, they don't, and it basically blocks almost every kind of real progress. I believe that Russia is pretty much the same as Ukraine, except that: * Ukraine has a more diversified economy. * Russia has more natural resources. * Russia is bigger. * Russia is meddling in Ukrainian politics, but not vice versa. * Most of the bad mechanisms in communism were invented by Russians, and they're proud people that sometimes have a hard time to admit, that they're not that great. * Ukraine has a free press. Russia doesn't. * Ukraine is bilingual, Russia is monolingual and it seems to me that Russians have less motivation to learn other languages, than Ukrainians. Correct me on this one if you disagree. Somehow, I believe that China must be struggling with some of the same problems as Ukraine. Some great things happen in China, but I cannot believe that China will become a supermodern society without some major rethinking of basic mindsets, which does not happen in a few years. The price of labor is determined by a market price. If you have a billion unskilled workers in China, and a quarter of a billion in former Soviet, then the price of unskilled workers will not rise a lot. Many people wasted their investments in east Europe and China. I believe that China's future is, that some parts of it will be rich, and some parts will stay very backwards for a lot of decades. I haven't been to China myself, so correct me if I am wrong.