While these countries have devoted their efforts to create conditions to facilitate that middle-class could create new companies and projects in a supportive, friendly environment with clear legislation, a simplified bureaucracy, infrastructure and adequate security in some countries, we have seen as power groups, the old Soviet /communist burocracy took control of wealthness of the country and have raised a number of structures in place to discourage investment and initiative in the country, which have been blocked, hindered and even extorted.
We should not be surprised that some countries in Eastern Europe, as referred before, show much better figures than countries from Meriodional Europe such as Greece or Portugal. Higly skilled populations with strong willing to face the challenges of what we call 'global economy'.
However, other countries have established and attracted investment from big corporations, but have been unable to create a dynamic and open country. As a result, social differences have become larger, the middle- class virtually does not exist, and future growth prospects are much more limited. Romania and Bulgaria, although EU countries,- had all the tools and support for the transition-, today, are clearly not progressing as expected due to problems realted basically to corruption in political and judicial level. Others, such as Belarus or Ukraine, unfortunately, consolidated power structures not interested to develope freedom and democracy and create simple state structures to serve the population.
This list of 'winners' would place countries such as Slovenia, Estonia, Czech Republic. In a second group could include countries such as Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro. Already in another category, for social, cultural, political, historical etc. .. would be a group of countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Macedonia, Albania. In a special category, we would locate Kosovo as 'pseudo-country' controlled by criminal gangs which will obviously in the coming years remain isolated.
At a time when some people are calling for policies which will mean low wages, less welfare state as a recipe for overcoming the crisis, a look at Eastern Europe shows that only with education, reasonable wages and strong-efficient states structures, we can expect to have a stable economic growth at mid-term that comes accompanied by an improvement in living conditions of the population of these countries. Otherwise, what shall we need growth of a country for ?
It is not difficult to forecast that those countries that have adopted the prescription of more education, order, prosperity and less bureaucracy+corruption in the coming years, no matter international background, will consolidate its model with strong middle classes and stable growth.
