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I really don't like when every video you make boils down to "Germany and France are the bestest" 🙄 It's boring and repetitive. You were supposed to make a video about other members of the EU and you STILL circled back to your favorite countries...
I'm Romanian and only recently i visited Poland. I always thought it was Romania 2.0 but boy was I wrong. Absolutely incredible country, Poland is decades ahead of Romania.. not to mention houses are cheaper and salaries are much higher.
yeah.. romania should never joined eu/nato clowns at all ...they joined to late... ppl dont like west... they just hate russia but even that started to become irevanant for them... they may leave next after uk
As a Romanian/British citizen, I've returned to Romania after 16 years in Scotland. I used to make approx £2k after taxes in the UK. In Romania, i make the equivalent of £1.2k after taxes. However, my standard of living is actually higher. And i feel safer here. The purchasing power is the most important metric and i wish more central and eastern Europeans would understand this. Getting 2x or 3x more in Western Europe means nothing when rent is 2 to 3x higher, transport is 4x higher, a dinner at a restaurant is 3x higher or a ticket for the philarmonica is 10x higher (yes, true!). The only country i'd choose over Romania is Poland (and maybe Lithuania); been there 6 times now - people ar 30% more civilised than in Romania and the infrastructure is class (less turkish and balcan influence), but that language kills me haha
Greetings from Poland, I'm very glad you like it here. I'm amazed by how strong Romania is developing. I think our countries should get closer in international politics since we are at similar development stage and hence shere much of our perspectives.
I'm from Lithuania and it is all true. We are one of the best Eastern countries and we view Balkans more like a wild west. People are more wild, more eastern culture, far behind us economically and culturally which was apparent during my visit to Balkans.
@@REgamesplayerDon't say your ignorant views about Balkan countries are thoughts by all Lithuanians. Balkans are great, economy, people, nature... Very few people think of that region as "wild". P.S. I am Lithuanian, just a little more travelled than my ignorant country man spreading BS views. :-)
@@Blanka1100 I had a few older coworkers that were educated in that time. One of my coworkers told me she was the last year that had to learn Russian in the school, in Poland--she didn't seem happy about it. Life moves on, already younger generation didn't think about these things anymore.
@@seneca983 It is the same with Nato membership. My country joined in 1999 but for Americans and many Westerners we are "new" and "former soviet". It is like calling Germans "former"...you know who...It is high time everybody stopped looking at us throught Russia's eyes. We moved on and it was the best thing possible to do.
@@Blanka1100This is a very spot on comment! 👉🏼🎯 Spain and Portugal joined the EU in 1986, which makes it 18 years until 2004. Nobody called them „new members” in 2004… while it still occurs in 2024 - 20 years after the big expansion. But the „former nazis” observation is really acute - it has been 35 years since 1989, which is equivalent to 1980 vs 1945 🤯 Did anyone call Germans „former nazis” in 1980? Time really seems to have accelerated in the recent decades… 35 years before 1945 was 1910 🤯! Can you imagine?!
10 more years and Bulgaria will leapfrog you. Maybe Hungarians will wake up to how bad Orban is when they read the headline "Hungary now the poorest EU member state".
It's amazing how much damage Orban has done. Hungary should be in the perfect position to grow well, but he's cosying up to authoritarian Russia purely because of his ideology
@@TzvetozarCherkezov they wont. even now we see headlines that "romania has overtaken us in..." but these headlines are only getting to people who wouldn't vote for fidesz anyways. these headlines never make it to fidesz voters because our media landscape is corrupt.
Yup, for us Romanians it's crazy that we've caught up to Hungary... we've had a LONG line of incompetent and populist governments... we can see their blunders, how they're keeping us back, all our growth is from the private sector, despite the government. So... how bad actually is Orban??? And people keep voting for him, unbelievable
@@greyhound6686 I notice a lot of empty Rail Cars all over Balkan Nations Rail Yards. It almost appears like the EU is exploiting Balkan Resources that were being domestically productive? Could we be asking the EU if their Fiat Currency is worthy of losing sleep over? Who needs who is one more way of saying it?
@@IntoEurope you dutch have scared the nation..when the international court issued an arrest warrant for the american president for iraq, you screwed up because the usa made it a law that if you arrest him, they can attack you militarily
I don't know about other countries, but for Croatia, I can say that from the 20s until now, most of the larger industrial companies have been sold off or destroyed due to bad management, without any indication that anything will improve. Croatia is heavily dependent on tourism and joining the EU has clearly increased the number of tourist arrivals and earnings from tourism. Croatia has a lot of illegal construction especially on the coast for tourism and other purposes due to corruption and illegal renting where individuals or individual families get rich, so that a lot of money disappears instead of going to the state treasury. Corruption is not decreasing, maybe is even getting a little worse. And not talking about the extreme exodus of people highly educated and uneducated, villages and smaller towns disappearing and low birth rates, it's a huge disaster waiting to happen. These problems are not negligible and do not appear to be improving any time soon. I have the impression that the lack of births and the large exodus of people from the so-called Eastern Europe in the near future will have a catastrophic effect on everything from the economy to the quality of life.
Finally someone who isn't blindly praising only the advantages of the EU. Question: in your opinion the adoption of Euro helped or rather damaged the economy, in the sense that everything is more expensive now because of it.
@@MMerlyn91 It's not even a debatable question, you'll be hard pressed to find an honest person who doesn't think adopting Euro has mad everything more expensive. Everything is so obviously much more expensive now, the amount of conversations I've had about how expensive everything is now, it's through the roof, everyone is commenting on it. They'll point to salaries rising, but that's barely happening and definitely not catching up with the costs.
@@joschmo4497 That's the thing, Euro made everything more expensive in every Western country, Italians and Germans both complained about this. Yet I've seen many Croats very vocal that it's not the case, which seemed suspicious to me. Same story with Baltics and Euro. These people would lie to themselves and everyone else rather than admit a mistake, I know their kind, most of Romanians are the same way. And this bothers me because I think that the switch to Euro will also be pushed here and I'm completely against that.
I dont know where you guys live but before 10 years it was so bad that it couldnt been worse. Today, ok, inflation is everywhere but there is a feeling that money is going around. Da neko kaže da je prije 10 godina bilo bolje, to može samo hrvatski sklop u glavi koji vidi samo crnjak. Dabas možeš raditi i zaraditi. Ako danas ne možeš u hrv uspjeti, onda osobno nećeš nigdje.
One slight manipulation in otherwise very interesting video - capitals being richer than rest of the country and therefore poorer than EU average is not eastern EU phenomenon - only Germany, Netherlands and few other smaller countries have regions richer than EU average.
I remember going to Croatia on vacation as a kid with my parents very fondly. It was a pleasant and an affordable location. Having recently spent our summer vacation there with my wife, I was shocked how expensive everything was. There’s literally no incentive for me to pick it over Italy now since it costs the same. And I find Italian cuisine better and I also prefer sandy beaches to pebble beaches. I’m sorry to say it but I believe Croatia overshot the mark with those prices.
I am a Dutchman and I've been living in the Czech Republic. Czechia is not catching up with the Netherlands and there are more and more poor people here. Actually, there was a recent publication in Euronews saying that the gap between the rich and poor countries in the EU widens, so that means the opposite of what we here in this video. Wealth of nations: Gap between rich and poor in Europe widens
Are you in tech or “normal” job? How much are you getting? Do they accept English or you need to know their language right away? Asking for a friend 😉 Portugal- Were you retire under the sun😂
Finally someone who makes a sensible video instead of copying dumb "Poland BIG!" nonsense. Until those countries create their own IPs and companies they will be locked in problem of having a work force to expensive for direct investments and not productive enough to grow further
Very true, at this rate most of eastern europe will fall into the middle-income trap like czechia. It still lacks sizeable domestic companies which can compete with the west. Most figures on future growth are based on growth not decelerating, which will also happen as their economies grow.
@@MMerlyn91 have you seen the wage hike that happened last two decades? Countries like Poland or Czech Rep start being to expensive. Few production facilities already closed their factories in Poland (eg. Levis, Fiat or Michelin). Corporate jobs are also under question with companies transferring processes to India
@@MMerlyn91 actually at this specific point things are quite different from what it was 20 years ago. also situation in these countries also differs from each other, for example minimum wage in Poland is now 1000 eur, meanwhile in Bulgaria 477. It's not that profitable for companies to build factories in Poland anymore
@@Lamoa29 there is no middle income trap if you don't adopt the same economic policies like the western countries. For example: progressive income tax, high taxes for business, big welfare state, high debt created by a national pensions system, high minum wage and unsustainable national health care.
From my experiences, Eastern Europeans work many hours, but their work is very inneficient and they still have that mindset that good worker stays in work for at least 12 hours, that's why they are still poor, their economy is based on cheep and very inneficient work, their owners don't invest, they just order more hours to solve the problem. We were also working like that before covid here in Czechia, thankfully, at least something got better here, especially because of our very low unemployment, when your wokrers say they will be working "only" 8 hours, you can't fire them because you will not find any new people on work market. We have some conflicts with romanians and ukrainians here in Czechia because of that, because native people deny to work more than 8 hours and weekends, but these workers from east vice versa want to work like that for some reason we don't understand.
@@eveningabused5123 Lithuania is not real eastern europe, your culture and history is western. BTW, I was working exactly like that for years - 2 days of 12h shift and 2 free days and I didn't like it because I worked most of weekends and holidays so when you want to go somewhere with friends, you can't.
No one in Eastern Europe expects that we will ever catch up with West European countries nor is it something that we care about, but it's undeniable that EU integration is pretty much the best thing that has happened to Eastern Europe since the end of WW2, especially for those of us who are old enough to remember what life was like before the 2000s.
Good to hear it's working out relatively well. Certainly if one looks East beyond the EU things look a lot less good yet, it's good many nations managed to avoid the outcomes seen in the various countries there.
@@Murmilone Indeed it has, but not all countries saw similar improvements. In this case one can compare to the countries to the East and notice that a rather clear divide in development has occurred. This is especially stark as some of those countries started off in a better position originally economically. So EU countries caught up and surpassed such countries. So pretty obviously the EU did have some pretty positive outcomes economically. It has also stability wise really helped out quite a lot, as one can once again see by looking out East of it. The difference is pretty stark in how calm EU countries are on average compared to the non-EU ones to the East. Another interesting factor has been, that while in much of the world many a country ends up stuck in a middle income trap situation, this has not happened so far I've been able to identify in the EU, with countries growing cleanly through it to more developed economic status. Overall it is as such hard to not see the EU having been very helpful for many countries futures.
In Czechia, life in 90s was maybe better than today with cost of living crisis. I am glad I was a kid still in normal days, today parents have problem to find kingergarten and schools for their kids, they pay more than one salary for rent and streets are not safe anymore. I am not saying I want that time back, some things are much better now - cities are restored, everything look pretty good, but as an ordinary person, you don't feel that profit in your wallet, it got much worse after 2020 and this government is full of clowns who have no idea how ordinary people live. When they speak about not increasing salaries of politicians or judges this year (so it stays at like 150 000 CZK), they are angry and want to protest, but ordinary person lives with like 25-30 000 CZK and rent of flat is also 25-30 000 CZK. This government will fall and populists will win and I don't know what is worse.
There are certainly a fair few people that that have noticed there was a period of instability with the pandemic, supply chain disruption and war, causing quite a few issues, yeah. Hopefully the problems caused in those years can over time be more fully fixed. Though I'm not sure one can really blame the current government for a fair bit of those larger scale problems. Some times one gets handed a bad hand for a bit. I guess it's fortunate that at least their were reserves to work with to help some what bridge the times, I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen with out it... Hopefully things won't go all populist because of it though, yeah... I don't think many of them really have any kind of solution to things. They're different... but that isn't always a good thing.
Well Slovenia now got 53 287 dollars of the GDP PPP per capita by the estimates for the 2024. While Japan got 54 184 dollars of the GDP PPP per capita for the 2024. So yeah. Something really big has happened with the development of the ex communist Europe.
@@joseferiksson2281 We're not the same at all. We have different economy mix, for example. Poland has really mixed economy and isn't dependent on automotive industry as much as Czech Republic or Hungary, but we have big problems with green electricity, because most of power we get is from coal. This simple example shows that our countries are similar, but can encounter different problems in the future. Maybe we have a lot of similar advantages, but we have different disadvantages.
People think they are some of the poorest countries in the world but the opposite is true, they are some of the richest. By most metrics they are going to be in the top 50 out of the worlds 200 countries
@@Crimson19977 Even during communism east europe was only poor compare to west europe ,but comapre to 80% off the rest off the world was actually Ritch .I lived in communist country Yugoslavia and we had everything average person in west had ,just maybe some new technological stuff they would get few years earlier
Yes. Many of my fellow countrymen still hide behind that "we're small and poor, insignificant" nonsense. It's partly dejection induced in people by the decades of totalitarian regime, partly just laziness. "Don't expect anything of us, just give us money." I often feel ashamed of how many people like that we have. (And then they fill their cars with beer and go spend their fully paid holiday at their cottage or by the sea... Hypocrites.)
I think it's worth emphasising that convergence is already pretty much a fact - Poland, Czechia, Lithuania and Slovenia are already ahead of Portugal and Greece. Slovenia is also ahead of Spain, with Poland being just 6% behind Spain, and Czechia 3%. That's 2-4 years until we catch up with recent growth tendencies. More over, Slovenia will catch up with New Zealand and Japan next year (minimal difference). Italy is the next goal. (All values are GDP per capita PPP, IMF 2024 estimate)
@@denizaydemir6756 Everybody cares about PPP. Because you may earn $1 million /month in a country but be poorer than other countries if a loaf of bread is $500.000 there. But I suppose that is hard to understand for some people.
@@RaduRadonys You're absolutely right. But I think Denizay Demir here is Turkish and thinks that *Turkey's* standing in the ranking is unreasonably high. It's difficult for me to verify, but it's a wide belief that Turkey has had tremendous economic problems in recent years. Plus, I did notice that Turkish people are very high in the list of nationalities who receive work permits in Poland, and it puzzled me why would they choose a country not so much richer than themselves. India, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan I understand... but Turkey?
@@RaduRadonys none cares about the PPP. the US is the first economy, but if you look at the GDP (ppp) American is second to China. The GDP (PPP) is an eastern european obsession, but it's almost impossible to calculate it (it's just a poor estimate about earnings/cost of the goods)
_Comparing the economies of countries based on GDP is like trying to compare the milk yields of cows based on the swarm of mosquitoes around them._ *GDP is calculated by different sectors:* primary (mining, farming), secondary (manufacturing, building), tertiary (services, tourism, education). At the end of 2022, the US GDP was $25 trillion, including the primary sector - 1%, the secondary sector - 19% and the tertiary sector - 80%. China's GDP was $18T, with primary - 7%, secondary - 40% and tertiary - 53%. Japan's GDP was 4.2T, primary - 5%, secondary - 20% and tertiary - 75%. Russia's GDP was $2.2T primary - 20%, secondary - 70% and tertiary - 10%. In total, in Russia, primary and secondary account for 90%, in China - 47% and in the US and Japan - 20-25%. The ratio of extractive vs manufacturing is much worse in USA than in Russia. America's economy is heavily dependent on services, which is why it's called the "Zombie Economy". *How can Russia possibly lose a war against the West in this scenario?*
Dlaczego piszesz jako "afraid"? Nikt się niczego tu nie boi, a to raczej my powinniśmy się bać bo skutki ewentualnego PolEXITu byłyby dla nas katastrofalne.
@@endrju9732wy i tak nie macie elity rzadzacej, ani zdefiniowanego interesu narodowego. Nikt nie jest w stanie powiedziec jaki jest plan i co jest interesem narodowym. Na nastepne 5, 10 czy 30 lat. Ale to dla was ok jak np. Partie ida do wyborow bez programu, albo go kompletnie nie realizuja. Wy i tak glosujecie na te same partie.
it's like the rise of India or China. if you're starting at the bottom of a list chances are you're going to be better in the future. but if you're already at the top, you can't really rise anymore. every country has a max amount of GDP it can produce, they are constrained by population size, land mass, geography etc. and Western Europe has had (at least) a 50 years head start on Central and Eastern Europe. but that also means Western Europe is much closer to the top of possible high point.
@@ChristiaanHW The British Empire feared Asian Unity, The USA now is looking at a BRICS Wall, that shields 70% of available resources. The Balkans look at Asia and the resources that are produced there. They compare the European Union, who seem to have consumed the available domestic sources until all profits were dug up and consumed. The G-7 created a lifestyle on Exploitation of Colonial Empires The USA has been attempting to operate a World Empire. Like a Crooked cop policing the world, shaking down Merchants for "Protection Money"...... Janet Yellen as Gangster Granny, saying "Put it in the Bag!" The effort of operating a Family Industry does tend to cost a lot? So the Balkans look at Orban, they say, "Who should we go with?" The G-7 needs Resources, the BRICS Guys have resources. Tough Choice?
I do hope Eastern Europe gets its day in the sun and start to become economic powerhouses themselves and become model EU nations. They’ve borne the brunt of so much destruction over the past several centuries. Their populaces deserve better. Then again, the populace of Western Europe deserves better from its politicians as well.
Im a Pole working in a sector getting people to Netherlands. You can forget that u will get educated normal people here. Even students for holiday work are difficult What about house prices? 200k euro and in Poland get u a house with a garden Here maybe a garage
Bear in mind a lot of the "Romania is becoming an economic powerhouse" youtube videos are made by some indian editors who've done no research and have their scripts written by chat-gpt. Someone is paying for those videos.
Why would someone pay for such videos??? What could someone possible gain from praising a random country? LOL :)) they are doing it for the views, since Romania has a large population and really good Internet many Romanians watch TH-cam. That's it.
@@RaduRadonys romania isnt that marketable. Romanians dont speak as much english as citizens of other countries and foreigners are very disinterested in romania. You also see it in statistics whenever someone makes a graph and they can't display every country romania is one of the first to get dropped, even if neighbours like hungary get included.
@@spamspam541 I mean 50% of the population still lives in villages and small towns, of course they don't bother learning english. But in the big cities most of the people know english pretty well I would say. Go to France, Italy or Spain in the big cities and you will see a lot of them can't speak english, even in Germany there are still many people that can't speak english. While it's true that foreigners aren't interested in moving to Romania, many foreign companies and businesses do, mainly because of the big and growing I.T sector in big cities, one of the fastest internet speeds in the world and a significant trained young population in programming. So yeah the problem is wealth distribution, 50% that live in rural areas are considered poor (despite many of them living happy in farmlands and nature) and the other 50% in big cities are somewhat wealthy in PPP standards. The government failed us but at least we got the private sector that it's booming.
@@spamspam541 So you are Romanian. No wonder that you leave nasty comment about Romania, it's written in many Romanian DNA to say shit about their own country. It's quite pathetic to be honest.
💶💵Money flowing from EU subsidies is not the most important thing. The most important thing for Poland was to be able to join the common economic market.
Maybe we would develop if Croatia did not have the same party in Power the entire time since our independence(HDZ) which is also legally convicted crominal organization
Yeah cool story, the other side is infinitely worse. What happened when SDP and Milanović were in charge? Oh right, a sh1t ton of money spent on god knows what. The problems are much deeper than that.
@@joschmo4497 you cant compare a party that was in power for 4 years with a party that has been in power for 20 years. the best party that could lead croatia would be Domovinski Pokret without HDZ
@@CroatianUltraNationalist Yeah you can, they're the worst clowns imaginable aside from Možemo. Agreed on DP, I personally voted for them, but I expected this outcome realistically. Better that they get some power than none of the power.
@@joschmo4497 god help us if Možemo ever comes to power. HDZ is terrible and corrupt but if možemo comes to power we can say goodbye to croatian culture and family values forever.
Your map is wrong on so many levels. Even Ustashe ultranazis in WWII didn't manage to implement such large Croatia (with Dalmatia, whole Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Serbia)
I find some of your statements a bit strange. For instance Czechia has a per capita income this year of around 30.000 euro, that's far far to high to be called a middle income country anymore. Middle income countries would love to be that well off. So it seems pretty obvious the Czechs are managing to transition to a developed economy, they aren't even that far behind Germany anymore which very strongly indicates they are converging. Just like if one actually looks at the economic data it is pretty clear West Europe isn't stagnating but Eastern Europe is still catching up anyway. Though strangest of all is to say the EU is an economic venture first, when it very clearly has been a political venture first. One can find that even in the founding statements of the EU. It's why even though at times things were difficult they worked through some of those difficulties rather then just cheap out. Long term this has seemed for the better for everyone as well, with better stability and prosperity for all then one could have otherwise expected. One but need look over the border to see alternate outcomes after all.
Yes, we Czechs have nothing to bitch about, although that won't stop us to do so, constantly... ;-) It's in our nature. Just note that we were a developed country from the very beginning. Between the wars (what we call the 1st republic), Czechoslovakia was an European tiger, we were better off than many (south-)western European countries. The 40 years of totalitarian regime and nonsensical economical model devastated the wealth (and, most importantly, the mentality of the people), but we had a solid base to return to, it wasn't like we had to develop the economy from scratch. That wasn't quite the case with other post-Soviet or Soviet-affiliated countries. Comparatively, e.g. to Romania, we're sloppy, we could do much better.
Live standards in the Czech Republic are pretty good. But our strategic vulnerability is economic dependence on Germany and the automotive sector. If either one of those pillars falls apart then we are screwed. Germany will survive without us, but we won't survive without Germany. Unless we quickly diversify our economy away from Germany and towardd the United States, Eastern Europe and Asia.
gdp per capita huh? theres so much more to standards of living than that. Poland for example has a lower gdp per capita than Czechia but a higher infrastructure and road quality rating. In fact the czechs have literally the lowest infrastructure rating of all neighbouring countries including Slovakia which is supposed to be kind of worse than you or for example inequality of wealth. In Czechia 37.8% of wealth is held by the top 1% of people. You are not too far off from russia where 50% of wealth is held by the 1%. In Poland its only 22.8%, meaning the gdp per capita is more equally distributed. We are in fact excelling in that regard compared to all of europe, and as we all know wealth distribution is very important. i'd advise you not to be satisfied with what you have and strife for greater heights
@@nexor7809 I completely agree, we Czechs have "fallen asleep on our laurels" as we put it. Countries like Poland and even Romania are poorer than us on paper but have much better economical momentum. We should take a leaf out of your book.
@@nexor7809 I personally brought up GDP per capita due to the video suggesting for some odd reason that Czechia was a middle income country. Of course in practise there are more factors, but those were thus beyond the direct scope of my point. Though I would like to note things like wealth inequality can be difficult to properly calculate for countries like Russia where much of the wealth at the top isn't actually known due to the corruption covering it up. This often tends to make such countries wealth inequality seem less high then it actually is. So I'd suspect the top 1% actually might hold substantially more yet there.
True. Small poor cities/towns voted out. They were manipulated but still what a irony 😂 meanwhile big cities that didn’t get much funding were voting to stay.
Hello from Romania. So here's a few things that I often think people have a bit of a bad take on: - development happening mostly in the capital - that's true to some extent, but not to the extend most content creators make it out to be. It is understandable though why this is the case with content creators: the statistics invariably do point out to a disproportionate level of development for the capital region compared to the rest. But here's the catch: the territorial unit of the capital either has no or barely any rural area in its composition, as opposed to any of the other territorial administrative denominations. It shouldn't be a mystery to anyone that cities produce a way higher wealth per capita compared to rural areas - a phenomenon that isn't at all unique to Eastern Europe, but that is happening everywhere. In actual fact, large cities across the territory have extremely close living standards, wages, productivity and GDP/capita to that of the capital, but it wouldn't appear so because they're never considered in those statistics with the same proportion of urban to rural people. I'll give the example of our capital, Bucharest, and our biggest cities other than the capital, which are Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara, Iasi, Constanta, Craiova, and the Galati-Braila area (these are two medium sized cities that are within 10km of each other). Of those, Cluj-Napoca (only the metro area, not including the county outside the city+suburbs) is essentially at somewhere around 95% to 100% of Bucharest's level on all accounts. Timisoara sits between 90% and 95%, Iasi 85% to 90%, with the others still being somewhere above 70%-75% of the capital's per capita average level of economic activity. In fact, the issue at least in my country (but I have an inkling that it's the same across the entire former communist Europe) is that the countryside is extremely left behind, and the newly found economic prosperity did not yet have time to spill over there as well, still being concentrated in the major cities and their metro areas. - the brain drain - actually, there are clear signs that people are beginning to return. The only thing is the phenomenon isn't happening at such a tremendous rate as to overtake the emigration that is still happening, but the net emigration, which has always resulted in a loss of population for us every year since the fall of communism, has essentially been halving every year since approximately 2017. For the more developed former communist countries, this started earlier, as early as 2010 in Czechia. There is, of course, still a pull of Western Europe, of the organized, picture perfect societies, where all the welfare systems works properly, the order of things has long been established, and where ultimately there is more money. This pull isn't instantly going to go away, but over time fewer and fewer people will see the need to leave their country. This phenomenon is similar to what happened with Spain and Portugal and Greece several years after they joined the EU. Furthermore, there are decent indications that there will be far less brain drain happening in the following decades, as well as a certain amount of incoming immigration, both from the West and from outside of the EU. I don't believe our labor crisis is going to be as severe as some of the less hopeful prognoses are making it out to be. - the convergence rate is a bit bloated by European statistics - this happens because the EU looks at PPP values, and not nominal ones. When Eurostat looks at GDP statistics, or average wage stats, and so on, they look at adjusted values for price levels. These result in Eastern Europe sitting between 70% and 90% of the EU average. However, if you consider that the price index in East EU sits between 57% to 70% of EU average in most East EU countries (Slovakia is a big exception on this), this should tell one that things aren't exactly as they are made out to appear. Take again my country, Romania: our price index for 2023 was 57% of EU average, the lowest in the EU, and our GDP PPP per capita sat at 78% of EU average. That means that if you unadjust for current prices (which may rise at any point because of any kind of inflation inducing shock, such as was the case for the war in Ukraine and the subsequent trade war with Russia), our actual value is 0.57 x 0.78 = 44.46% of the EU average, in nominal value. Now, obviously it does matter how much you can buy with a nominal amount, but in my opinion it is a bit more relevant to at least look at both values, not just the PPP value for GDP. Once you also look in nominal terms, you'll see that Czechia, the second wealthiest of the new EU members, which is presented in the Eurostat data as being virtually on the same level as Italy, actually barely sits at 70% of the Italian GDP per capita, and this should be a better explanation as to why Czechia is still a middle income economy rather than there being a magic trap that stops development. The gap is closing, both in price-adjusted terms as well as in nominal terms, but there is a longer way to go. :) - there is one advantage in Eastern Europe that people never account for: several East European countries actually have some of the world's lowest gini coefficients. It's certainly not true for all (e.g. Romania and Lithuania and especially Bulgaria are significantly above the EU average in income inequality, although it has been decreasing since the pandemic years in Romania quite fast), but it is absolutely true for some - Slovakia, Slovenia and Czechia are the world champions in terms of lowest inequality. In fact, this low inequality is so relevant that is causes Slovenia, a country which is also reasonably developed otherwise, to find itself in the world top 10 countries ranked by the inequality-adjusted human development index. It is also the only country in that top 10 that does not have a world leading nominal GDP/capita. This low inequality results in lower levels of crime, more social solidarity, and just an overall higher quality of life than just looking at the GDP might otherwise suggest. These things will eventually lead to incoming quality immigration, that will boost the economies of these countries, but also to a higher degree of workforce participation of the available population (as everyone has more or less equal opportunities in education, housing, and so on). So do I believe that eventually there will be more convergence? Absolutely yes, I think it's happening, but I think we'll need between 15 and 30 more years before we'll see Eastern EU being more uniformly developed with the west. However, it will take much less before at least some East EU countries will overtake Southern EU, because Southern EU has both a productivity and a supply chains problem, as well as disfunctionally high debt to GDP ratios and structural economic issues which the East does not have. Take just this small example: in Romanian public discourse, it is considered a huge problem that our debt to GDP is hoovering around 50%, and automatic debt reduction measures are triggered as soon as public debt rises past the 50% threshold. In the meantime, Spain's debt-to-GDP is 95%, France's is 98%, Portugal 117%, Italy 134% and Greece 168%! Naturally, higher debt-to-GDP doesn't automatically constitute a problem in and of itself as long as you can finance it at relatively low cost, but how long do we actually believe that the cost will be low for these countries? Maybe it will keep being for France and Italy, but the others? Not likely for so long. They'll have to go through austerity sooner or later, the likes of which will be alien to the East.
Purchasing power is probably a nice concept to reach a cozy conclusion that hardworking Central Europeans are catching the sinking West as national entities a bit faster than the >20 000 USD per capita gap suggests. And the concept of regional contribution to GDP drives a wedge between the urban and rural areas quite nicely in the internal politics. But the concept of regional GDP per capita (PPP) is methodologically a steaming pile of turd. Vilnius and Bratislava are not ahead of Sweden outside Stockholm or Finland outside Helsinki in terms of some imaginary purchasing power.
@@mattihalme81 No, I disagree, it's not an esoteric concept, it has its uses. Especially when it comes to assessing the value of services (but also goods) that cannot be transacted across borders, PPP is much more valuable than nominal. For example, when you buy a haircut, the price differs massively between having it in Paris, France or having it in Razgrad, Bulgaria, but the service is essentially the same - same man hours, same chemicals used, same amount of labor. Same goes for real-estate - you know how the price of real-estate is dependent on "location, location, location" - building habitation of a certain area is essentially the same whether it is located in central Amsterdam, NL or in Lublin, PL, despite the sell price being different. If the cost of energy is different in two different places, that should also be factored into the equation, especially when trying to compare living standards. But even when it comes to comparing GDP per capita, it can be useful; take, for instance, US healthcare, with its abysmal outcomes: it surely is expensive, but at the end of the day, in spite of having the highest per capita expenditure in the world on healthcare, the US population has an average life expectancy worse than Poland. Why is that? Well, because their expenditure finances a parasitic class of middlemen numbering in the low millions, namely the private insurance people, that bloat the incurred expenses for healthcare and cause the entire system to be inefficient. Yet when you add up the GDP of the USA in nominal terms, the so-called added value created by those ineffective middlemen actually adds up to GDP. And it's not a small amount - it's 17.3% of the entire GDP of the USA. If you'd adjust for purchasing parity, you'd get a much better term of comparison between, say, western Europe and the US, especially when it comes to health expenditure being factored. So these services and goods do account for a large part of the economy, and it is frankly dumb to try to only evaluate them on a nominal basis. On the other hand, PPP has the disadvantage that not all goods and services are added up when calculating the basket of goods used to calculate the conversion into the purchasing power standard, never even mind the proportions used within the basket for the goods and services that do get factored. Of course, when trying to calculate the PPS, economists do try in good faith to choose a representative basket, but still, it is a relative measure at the end of the day, and even the value of this relative measure is different depending on what specifically you're trying to compare at any given time. Then again, I'll bet you anything that if you were to remove all the monetary transfers received from the state budget by areas outside of Stockholm / Gottenburg / Malmo from Sweden, or areas outside of Helsinki & surroundings from Finland, which in essence do come from these more productive areas, you'd actually end up with Bratislava and Vilnius far exceeding those areas. But do keep in mind, they too subsidize development in Slovakia and, respectively, Lithuania - in the same way Stockholm does for Sweden and Helsinki does for Finland.
These inequality stats may turn out to be lies. For example, the official Gini for household income in Poland is 0.30, but the true one, based on research using income tax data, is 0.45, almost as high as in the US.
Well yeah some of those countries like Estonia Czechia or even Slovenia actually ARE getting better but the wages aren't really growing and for example a lot kf Czechs wanna same wages as germany but it's just not possible hmmmm I wonder why
@examplenameyoutube Nope, it's not utopian, it's simply reality. It may be frustrating and even unfair, but that's life. What's the alternative? I mean, nothing is stopping you from moving those 150 km westwards, if it really is so convenient... And that's the benefit of the EU membership. Nothing to complain about.
The Czech Republic has already overtaken all European countries (in terms of the lives of their citizens) and is now the best country in Europe. The Czech Republic has very good salaries, and the earnings are the same as in Germany if you take into account the cost of living
Some of the main reasons in descending order. 1 The fall of communism 2 Peace and Stability at last 3 On average we work harder than many people in Western Europe. 4 Joining organisations like EU or NATO
You forgot the huge subsidies from those lazy Western European tax payers pumping billions of euro into your countries, Poland alone has received more than 200 billion.
No! Bulgaria has failed miserably!!! The EU opened the borders and many people young and old left in search for better life. Most of them found it and stayed abroad. The Bulgarian lev is pegged to the EUR which worsened inflation with some months peaking at over 15%!!!!!! Our country became haven for poor Brits trying to buy cheap rural property and for western digital nomads working for FOREIGN companies. The only towns that are somehow developing are Sofia , Plovdiv and Varna while the rest of the country is literally dried up of people and industries. Not to mention the amount of EU funds that were stolen/misused by the Bulgarian government to try and fix the poor infrastructure across the country. And by development I mean outsourcing foreign companies that establish themselves here for cheap labour and rent. It's already 2024 and it's really disastrous.
It is important to set the right comparison, the peer group for EU's eastern countries might rather be other ex-sowjet republics...If we compare growth rates then, the convergence we have witnessed looks even more stunning. This underscores the importance of the free, shared market. Also, it is important to remember convergence is not a zero-sum game: a rising tide lifts all the boats. Great video thanks!
It's important to remember that since gaining the first independence at the end of WW1, most "Eastern European" countries were already converging with the rest of Europe, with often above average economic indicators. Like the Baltic states, ex.g. Latvia were around #7 in wealth pp and other proportional economic health statistics. It wasn't singled out as seperate "Eastern" Europe as today, it was just Europe of the period between the two world wars. Until occupation happened around 1939. Unfortunately it cannot return to previous state sooner than 3-4 decades by reasonable projections. We cannot return to the past, just to keep on trying to catch up and finding our strengths.
As a Latvian i can say that this only affects the big cities - the regions and small towns are dying out. The progress is very minor or non-existant...
You actually believe that Western Europe has higher living standards than you? They don't. It's all in your head. They have higher prices, and migrants to pay for.
@@marcv2648 migrantion sure ... romania have on average the same prices like in gemrany and for alot of products even more ... .the ua imigrants when they left ua when russia first invaded said romania has swiss prices for stuff ffs ....nobody watend to take ceausescu down back then... he had to pay the debs so he did ... now we have 200b $ debs and we are losing population like there is not tomorow ... even if we leave eu/nato next year is way to late ... instead if going to 30m -40m ceausesucu times we are going to 10 m from 24m in 2100
GDP is a really flawed metric to base the living standards on(Ireland is an even better representation of that). Officials close to the government and management got rich in Romania but regular people don’t feel an improvement in their life and I can actually give myself as an example. I am software engineer that got my first job in a German Automotive company, in Romania. I came in as a KDE open-source contributor and with some programming competition wins but my salary didn’t match that, it was 420 Euros/month, having money for rent and 2 weeks of food. The company profits were through the roof but our living standards were sh*t, even though it’s a job that pays well in countries like Germany or US. If you go on a drive through Romania, you can see that GDP is disconnected from people’s wellbeing
On the other hand there's very well paid jobs. My brother's wife works at a laser removal salon.. no training no nothing and she makes 9000 lei per month ( 1808eur after tax ). It's all down to how lucky you are in finding the right job
That’s bizarre. Starting salaries for any sort of software engineer in Sofia are 2000lv and up (€1000) with experienced employees reaching up to 4000-5000lv (€2000-2500). Of course those are salaries for the capital city, but in many cases working remotely in a smaller town gives you similar numbers.
Thats so sadly true, but there is a small hope it is possible that if the economy grows enough that people from Eastern Europe who migrated to western Europe will come back as job opportunities grow
@@Justicsgenie That won't help that much. The demographic decline won't be stopped by old people coming back---and they'll need their pensions, soon, too. It's either people starting to have more children on average (which is unlikely) or economical (im)migration. That's the simple fact of life and economy, like it or not.
@@Justicsgenie how long would that help these countries though? The people going back would be older some with children already. They would likely just add to the nations they left in the population not having new kids
It's wrong to talk about German centrist economies and lump in the Baltic states with rest of Eastern Europe. The Baltic states economies biggest export markets are the Nordics. For example 18 % of Estonia's exports go to Finland and 13 % to Sweden. Same is true to a less degree in Latvia and Lithuania.
From a perspective of someone born in Poland in 2005 I can just say that this country is completely different from what it was during my childhood. You can see plates saying that the project was cofunded by the EU everywhere.
What? Your childhood was about the year 2010. Things were already pretty normal by then. I was growing up in the 1990s, and I can really see the difference, then vs. now.
chill bro... u got some 5% at best from the money western companys are making in poland and u will also lose half of the pop. till 2100... poland is gonna have 10 100y+ retired ppl left in the country because Eu .... no eastern country should had joined eu/nato clowns at all... its a total exploatation and modern colonization ... the majority of poland factorys are not even polish owned ...99% of the profits go to germany made by bad paid polish workers
@@lordwiadro83 I realise that but there's still a big difference between how it was 2005-2010 and how it is now. Didn't want to insult anyone born before me, it's just my perspective. Also I come from a small village where most changes happened later than in urban areas.
Central Europe is a geographical term. Eastern Europe is a (correct) geo-political term---and the video was about that. Don't be ashamed of coming from Eastern European country (one that used to be behind the Iron Curtain). It was bad, but it's undeniably our history (and the historical experience does also have its positives, especially now).
@@vaclavkrpec2879 no it's not, and im not ashamed of that, no idea why are you implying that. Central Europe is historcal, cultural, political region of Europe. The west-east division comes from cold war period. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe?wprov=sfla1 Tbh geo concept does not make sense to me. Europe 'ends' on Ural mountains which is much futher than Atlantic coast from PL, CZE, SLO or HUN
@@asdasasdasasdas Well, modern history matters more in this context, I think… And good for you for not being ashamed; I only suspected that because I heard too many people saying things like “_we_ are not like those Eastern Europeans, we’re *central*…” which is deplorable IMO…
@@vaclavkrpec2879 Iron Curtain is long gone. Those terms are obsolete. There is no reason to believe in any means: culturally, financially, geopolitically countries like Portugal and Sweden have more in common with each other than let's say Germany and Czechia, because Iron Curtain existed.
@@blinski1 Of course the legacy is still here. 30 years is nothing. Even the difference between former west and east Germany is still present, go and ask Germans. Go and try to breathe the air in Germany in the winter and then try in Poland. We in the east still feel the burden of the devastation of our countries that the decades of communism brought about. You can’t just click a switch and get rid of that. And most importantly, the devastation of minds of whole generations of people; that’ll take yet another generation to clear out, at least.
Poland had grown faster during the 10-year period BEFORE it joined the EU than in any 10-year period after that. Joining EU meant that stablished Western European companies could easily block emergence of Eastern European Tencents or Samsungs.
00:25 Former East Germany should also be red, I never got why East Germans who lived under the same system as Poles and Bulgarians are somehow counted as "Western Europeans", people still build large Commie blocs in Brandenburg as they do in Romania or Russia. Culturally speaking, East Germany is still an Eastern European country.
Western Europe should invest in the Central and Eastern European countries instead of investing in China, India, Russia etc which are Eu rivals, since the Europeans can work freely and once these countries catch up with the Western countries they will became net contributors to the EU's budget. The are more than 150 million people living in the "New Europe" + Ukraine, Serbia, N. Macedonia etc 2x UK population, this could mean a $7 trillion (compared to $2.5 trillion as it is now) economy, if per capita is the same as UK's! basically $4.5 trillion could be generated if they converge with Uk's per capita in nominal terms for the European economy.
Not sure what the UK has to do with this, but I agree with the central concept of investing within the union and the countries on the accession list, instead of off shoring to Asia.
This video is spot on. Czech Republic is excellent on paper, but it has severe limitations to growth and there are unsolved factors that can halt the economy. 1. The middle income trap is very real 2. Overreliance on export, economic dependence on Germany and automotive sector 3. Lack of innovation and government investment in infrastructure 4. Destructive neo-marxist policies pushed from the EU that can threaten national security and energy security. Personally, I am a fan of leaving the EU and creating a new block under the leadership of Poland (Intermarium), based on traditional Christian values and self reliance in strategic areas (food, energy, immigration, defence). Eastern Europe needs to lower dependence on Germany and France and cooperate more with the United States and Asia.
Points 1, 2, and 3 are spot on, but I can't agree with 4, nor with your idea of greater cooperation with US and Asia. It was exactly the common EU approach to secure gas after Putins invasion that allowed us to heat our homes, albeit rather more expensively. And as to national security---ask Ukrainians how it is not to be part of a bigger alliance. The US (especially under Trump) are highly protectionist, the cooperation would be much more uneven than within the EU. We'd lose a lot, not a great idea. And look at where did Zeman's attempts for cooperation with China ended up---our businesses just lost IP and there was nothing. Utter shambles. Not to mention that in economics, distance matters... I do agree that we should cooperate more with Poland (and generally with our close neighbours)---but not to ditch Germany or the EU but simply to extend and diversify the international cooperation we have. As to traditional Christian values---forgive me, but 1/ they have nothing to do in business and 2/ in our, pretty atheistic country, I think you're knocking on the wrong door. I'll pass on that, anyway.
The problem is the Czech Republic hitched its wagon to Germany. Germany has no future. Well they have a future, but it is a future of decades more industrial decline, social strife and eventual acceptance of Sharia. Your point 4 is also spot on. It is the root cause of Europe's long decline.
@@marcv2648 Yes, Marxism is German invention. They exported it to Tsarist Russia in order to weaken it. It worked surprisingly well, better than anybody expected. Russia could have become a world superpower number one after WWI, but instead it collapsed after 70 years, rotting from within. Now Germany is destroying its own country by their own ideology. The cancer of Marxism spreads unfortunately throughout Western universities and the whole Western world.
The UK could do with that, certainly... ;-) Spain? The thing is---it just sounds weird, you know. I did (grudgingly) start to use the short name, but it still doesn't sound right. Even the Czech "Česko" sounds a little odd. That's the only reason we still often use the official, long name.
People in this part of Europe are sensitive to basically just 2 issues 1. uncontrolled migration from third world and 2. other countries looking down on them. These 2 issues converged in 2015 during migration crisis into a perfect storm during which western politicians called people from eastern EU everything on a spectrum from "backwards" through "uneducated" to "nazis" when overwhelming consensus amongst people was NO to open borders and local politicians acted on this (for once they did what people wanted). Protect Shengen borders and cut that "we know better" bullshit and there will be no Ficos, Orbans or Polexits.
No, that countries from central and eastern Europe converged certainly didn't caused Italian massive debt problem and didn't cause your productivity to be that low. How is that it affected only Italy? (it's only my opinion I very open to discussion)
Why this film at all? And what's the question at the end? It all depends on what the EU will be . Poland does not intend to stop developing nor does it intend to pay into the EU forever in situation where it will not have any power or for example, and the EU will make decisions that hit the economies of countries like Poland. If the EU blocks this development, then there will probably be such thoughts.but other countries will probably come out faster too . Generally, Europe does not have a great future without big European project in long term but it also does not have it with the screwed up European project with screwed up oligarch where feudal systems decide not meritocracy and live detached from reality elites that generate more problems than benefits for Europe.
I'm Polish and lemme tell you. I have eastern salary, but in many cases prices are higher than in germany. As a train driver i made 19000€ gross per year, which is 12560€ net. And all that with 2-3 days overtime per month. Meanwhile renting a room price increased by 2x and renting an 30m2 apartment would require from me 700€ net per month
Mostly, we aren't. Here in Czech Republic, the debt-to-GDP ratio is quite low. But that's not necessarily that important. What really matters is how well you're able to repay the debt, not the debt in absolute numbers. Look at the US; they've the biggest national debt in the world _by far_, but they're doing just fine. If you borrow money to have a luxury dinner, that's a bad, dead debt. But if you borrow money to buy a car to be able to commute to a better job, that's an investment that pays back... Not quite the same on state level of course, but the principle holds. Borrowing money to improve infrastructure, invest into science, education, R&D and so on is beneficial. If you borrow to spend more on pensions, _then_ you're in trouble.
@@eveningabused5123 The US is doing far better than Europe and has been for the past 15 years. It’s the fastest growing developed economy by far, growing 2 times faster than Western Europe. Americans earn the highest disposable incomes in the world and are far richer than Europeans. US GDP Per Capita of $86,000 is 70% higher than France or the UK and 55% higher than Germany Unlike Europe, the US has high birth rates because people can afford to have more kids, houses are bigger=more room for a large family. And people move out at a younger age in America vs Europe due to cheaper costs of living relative to income levels. America has a rapidly growing population while western Europe has a rapidly aging and stagnant/declining population. US poverty rate is 11%, which is comparable to Western Europe. And US homelessness rate is 0.17% or 600,000 out of 340 million people. Which is half the homelessness rate of the UK All in all, the US has far greater growth potential than Europe. And the economic gap between the US and Europe will only grow wider as Europe is growing at about half the speed of the US
@@vaclavkrpec2879 National debt isn’t a bad thing so long as a country doesn’t default. It’s an investment into the country’s future growth. China’s growth has largely been due to investment through taking on debt, that’s why they have a 300% total debt to GDP ratio which is even higher than the America’s 250% total debt to GDP There’s a few European countries that have higher national debt and total debt than the US as well. Like Italy or Portugal for example. Germany is also very close to the US in total debt to GDP ratio (250% vs 235%)
The transformation of Romania and Poland, to give only two examples, has been incredible. Even if they were to stagnate completely, the progress in just one generation has been impressive. In the 1990s, most of Eastern Europe was starting with bankruptcy and a complete collapse in industry. My feeling is that most of Eastern Europe was forced into change. Western Europe, for the most part, is wealthy enough to postpone change. Some Western European nations have an economic model that would have been perfect for 1985, but struggles in the age of the smartphone, where information flows immediately and any stupid policy can result in money being moved away in seconds, rather than months or years. Not all of Western Europe is struggling--Netherlands, for instance, has an almost trillion dollar economy. The future of Germany, France and Italy presents some major obstacles. And then there is Belgium.
@@afonsoabreu5144 According to your flawed logic Austria, Sweden and Finland are new members of EU. Just like Spain or Portugal is. Or Greece. Just because there are older ones. Right?
@@Grzegorz_Grabowski Dude, Eastern Europe countries are the NEWEST! If a family has 10 children, they wouldn't say the 5th one is the young one, but the 10th will always be the youngest. It's not hard to understand really.
This is not true, Spain still has a higher GDP per capita, and it is also worth looking at, for example, GDP in the context of ownership structure, 10% of Lithuanian GDP is generated by one foreign company (Orlen), in the case of Spain, the ownership distribution is completely different.
I am from Poland and I don't really care, whether Eastern Europe catches up with the reset of EU. All I care about is, that my life is becoming better, and I will settle for that.
Greece is an example of country that does not benefit from the EU membership at all. It's an Orthodox Christian country, it culturally doesn't really belong into the West. Greek people want to have eastern work ethics but western standard of living. Decades of socialism made Greek manufacturing uncompetitive, Greek labour is neither cheap nor highly skilled, country has high debt and overly generous social system. It is the worst example of a country in middle income trap. I can see there are only two ways in which Greece can go. Cut government spending and lower wages to similar level of your neighbours Romania and Turkey. Or massively invest in high tech sector.
Form the hellenic alliance with turkey stop spending money on defense rather invest that money saved to the other sectors improve your infrastructure, prosper with Turkey and Balkans, if not there is no way coming out of this.
The first point being how economic stability is fragile and misleading as all the economic wealth is concentrated in the capital cities and the other regions still being poorer than the rest of the EU Me as a Brit, where towns and cities are going bankrupt and all the weath everything is London focused: ..... erm that's not normal for a big economy?
Thank you for using central/eastern Europe. I hate "Eastern Europe" because it just means "Poor Europe" or at best "post-soviet". Estonia has nothing to do with Bulgaria, the term is useless.
Czechia, spared the devastation of Hitler's invasion and the subsequent communist era, could be argued to be wealthier than Austria today. The historical disruptions caused by World War II and decades of communist rule stifled economic growth, innovation, and international trade. In contrast, Austria enjoyed more political stability and economic freedom during the same periods, allowing it to prosper. In the absence of these historical setbacks, it is conceivable that Czechia’s natural resources, skilled workforce, and strategic location might have enabled it to surpass Austria in economic development and overall wealth.
Even Hungary was significantly richer than Austria in the 50's. Even if the siege of Budapest was longer than Stalingrad, then we had communism. I have just been to beautiful Czechia, at least you maintained your castles and your heritage. In Hungary it was forbidden because we were supposed to be bad. Anything old and beautiful was left to rot away outside of Budapest. Now we are spending billions to renovate, but it takes time.
Let me give you a hint. Eastern EU will never be as prosperous as the west. We are talking former empires with vast financial resources. Yes you can read that 100 new factories are opened in Bulgaria, but they are German or Austrian owned. They are here only to pay the bare minimum and collect back every bit of profit. The factories, the machines, the know how is western owned and that's not going to change.
What do you mean they won't be that rich? Which specific citizen are you talking about?? There are a lot of rich people in Eastern Europe who own businesses, beautiful properties, luxury cars etc.
Generally average resident of a large city in Poland , if he sells his apartment in a large city in Poland, will also buy a nice apartment in many places in Western European countries. There is also a very large number of people who develop own businesses which grow .
I guess it depends. UK is collapsing, Greece and Italy doesn’t do to well. Yeah Germany, Netherlands and France will be always top 3 but they basically run EU they won’t let anyone take their place, rest of the west can be easily replaced by eastern countries.
@@IntoEurope it looks great. If l was you l would look at releasing some cool merch featuring that map. Honestly think about it. You could do posters, hoodies, cups,t-shirts, etc.
the thing is that the concept of recepient and provider only derives from the differences of economic outcome. So if Eastern European countries catch up, the differences will get smaller and therefore the percentage of money flowing to the EU relative to GDP will get smaller. In short: If everyone becomes a provider, nobody is a provider anymore.
@@expert69able my brother in christ for the industry to be important it has to make up good amount of industry or country's revenue and economy the so called "laser industry" dose non of it and all the nonsense with taiwan end up back stabbing us so no yeah maybe stop inhaling so much hopium
@@kestutisa3826 u are ware that laser industry and biotech is 2 different things even name itself say biotech i am talking about lasers last time i check lasers have nothing to do with living organism
Obviously the “new” EU countries have long ago converged with the more poorly managed “old” EU countries. The question of course is where to go from there. While textbook says transition to services, it isn’t quite as simple as this. Finance and tech have a reputation as big money spinners, but gsp per cap adjusted by state price indexes will quickly show you that NY and CA are very much NOT the richest states in the US. I think the lesson is that in the industrialized world, prosperity is as much about cost of living as it is about gross economic output.
It looked good between 2004-2020, but after covid, everything went to shits, our today living standard is like return to 90s, maybe even worse. Even when you have pretty good salary, you have problem to pay rent, electricity and all these things + kindergarten crisis (you will not find any) + school crisis + health care crisis + another like 20 crisises here in Czechia. 😀 It's for sure that populists will win next elections, I am not happy because of that, but it's inevitable when people can't afford to pay school lunches for their kids + EU totally doesn't care about double quality problem we have - western companies (mainly German ones) send worse quality for higher price to us and EU doesn't care. I know that Germans saved a lot of bankrupting companies after 1989, but now it's time to get rid of them finally, because they are not helping anymore, they are exploiting us, like with electricity, we have to send it to Germany and then we buy it back for 10 times higher price and people are extremely angry and you will see it after next elections.
Official aid was a big reason. An even bigger one was the redirection of surplus German capital from the Southern periphery to the East. This had major consequences which is often overlooked or not remembered. It was also a contributing factor to the Eurozone crisis in the Southern periphery. The South tended to attract "hot money". The East fixed capital investment.
@@paullarne You're actually stupid. If anything, the single market meant that smaller countries with a weaker economy had their domestic companies taken over and their population stolen, from a lack of jobs. The UK together with Germany was the biggest beneficiary of this situation. It's just that the British are duller then a circle, hence Brexit.
@@paullarneI mean West European companies gained access to Eastern European markets as well. Don't you think Britain's economic malaise is also tied to a lack of competitiveness and productivity, e.g. compared to Germany, Benelux or the Nordic countries?
@@paullarne That myth about "stealing jobs" is a nonsense, here in Czechia, we have 500 000 Ukrainians and they don't steal our jobs, they do jobs we don't want to do and they work 12 or even more hours, native Czech would never work like that, would you work like that as a Brit? Also western companies (especially german ones) are exploiting us since 1990 and they earn a lot of money from that, we have NO profit from that, we are doing well qualified jobs in their factories, but they pay 1/4 of their salaries and if you are a Brit, you are exploiting Inds and other people from your former colonies the same as Germans expoit us. Also I will give you an example of not honest nazi behavior of western european companies - some material is twice more expensive than 2 years ago, but when you want to increase price of products by 5%, Germans are angry and threaten that they will stop cooperating with us and we will earn nothing, while German companies like Lidl increase prices of food 10 times every years, some products are 3 times more expensive than few years ago and we have to tolerate this nazi behavior. So when you think we undercut you and profit from that, then think again.
Благополучие страны я считаю в том что она может без внешних вливаний за счёт своего бюджета содержать и развивать инфраструктуру и прочие вещи. Большинство стран Евросоюза сидит на подачках Брюсселя.
Interesting video but why are you still using "Czech Republic" (a rather outdated term in informal speech) when "Czechia" is the official short name in English? Even the EU website and the UN use Czechia exclusively. Not to mention all sports competitions, like hockey and the Olympics. Heck, even the Eurovision Song Contest uses Czechia since last year.
@@Pidalin It is the official short form and has been registered and underlined as the preferred mode of use when referring to the country. And while indeed you could use the official longform name, he hadn't done so for any other country, which makes the choice to do so here haphazard and odd.
@examplenameyoutube that is not true, for the simple fact that even "Czech Republic" causes some people to think it be the "Chechen Republic", I.e. Chechnya. I can think of a few infamous examples, especially that CNN news report about the attack on the Boston Marathon, when that mistake was made regardless, and the reporter used the "republic" form. Those who do not want to use "Czechia" justify it after the fact anyway they want, not for some actual deeply held legibiliy reasons. Bohemia is an exonym that refered to an entirely different group if people that used to inhabit the land before Czechs migrated to it in the 6th century, and today still would only refer to part of the country, angerinfmg those who live in Silesia and Morava. It is the same annoyance as referring to the Netherlands as "Holland", it also makes the people of Utrecht or Limburg peeved.
I have no clue why did you change your country name and what for...Do not be so oversensitive. Chechia sounds like "Chechenya" and I guess it is not what you want to be mixed with.
Czech Republic is still perfectly correct name of the country. Personally, I like it better (many of my fellow countrymen find "Czechia" to sound weird... Even "Česko" in Czech sounds a bit odd.) It's not in any way outdated.
Yes, Croatia is doing great under HDZ although it has been a member of the EU for only 10 years, not 20 like the Eastern European countries. For years in a row it has among the highest GDP growth in the Europe, among the highest growth in industrial production, while the infrastructure is constantly being built (seaports, highways, bridges, tunnels, etc.). The problem is the radical Left in the country, which constantly hinders Croatia wherever it goes, where most of all they hate the success of Croats and Croatia. 😄
the only thing HDZ did in the past 20 years is steal and destroy. croatia used to have factories, shipbuilding used to be a thing now it is just tourism our judicary used to be independent but this year HDZ took it over. Croatia used to be more developed than czech republic,poland,hungary and slovakia yet now it is barely richer than bulgaria. it is not even about the left-right divide HDZ does not have an ideology other than stealing, if you continue voting for HDZ even bulgaria will become richer than croatia not to mention there wont be a croatia in the future judging by the amount of people leaving the country.
What are you talking about? We had very LOW energy prices, until the maniac in Kremlin attacked Ukraine. How much do you think other countries pay for energies? People didn't even bother to insulate houses, because the gas was so cheap...
@@vaclavkrpec2879 Of course you do pay CO2 tax in your energy bill. How do you think it works? And the way EU counts cost of energy also makes it as expensive as possible.
Thank you to Arte for sponsoring this video, go check out their amazing documentary on EU enlargement: www.arte.tv/en/videos/113184-000-A/eu-enlargement-twenty-years-on/
That's a huge legit sponsor. Congrats!
Crongrats for tzhe Sponsor
ARTE my beloved
I really don't like when every video you make boils down to "Germany and France are the bestest" 🙄
It's boring and repetitive. You were supposed to make a video about other members of the EU and you STILL circled back to your favorite countries...
ARTE the most based
I'm Romanian and only recently i visited Poland. I always thought it was Romania 2.0 but boy was I wrong. Absolutely incredible country, Poland is decades ahead of Romania.. not to mention houses are cheaper and salaries are much higher.
How exactly are Polish wages much higher? The difference is minimal
@@leme5639 median income is higher. That's the only metric that matters for income.
yeah.. romania should never joined eu/nato clowns at all ...they joined to late... ppl dont like west... they just hate russia but even that started to become irevanant for them... they may leave next after uk
@@nicolaeadrian7882 Room temperature IQ take
@@Twin.motors Yes, because most people surely will be getting that wage. What are you people smoking ?
As a Romanian/British citizen, I've returned to Romania after 16 years in Scotland. I used to make approx £2k after taxes in the UK. In Romania, i make the equivalent of £1.2k after taxes. However, my standard of living is actually higher. And i feel safer here. The purchasing power is the most important metric and i wish more central and eastern Europeans would understand this. Getting 2x or 3x more in Western Europe means nothing when rent is 2 to 3x higher, transport is 4x higher, a dinner at a restaurant is 3x higher or a ticket for the philarmonica is 10x higher (yes, true!). The only country i'd choose over Romania is Poland (and maybe Lithuania); been there 6 times now - people ar 30% more civilised than in Romania and the infrastructure is class (less turkish and balcan influence), but that language kills me haha
Greetings from Poland, I'm very glad you like it here. I'm amazed by how strong Romania is developing. I think our countries should get closer in international politics since we are at similar development stage and hence shere much of our perspectives.
Yeah that's also a reason why many people from the post-soviet countries work in the Western block but live in the Eastern one
I'm from Lithuania and it is all true. We are one of the best Eastern countries and we view Balkans more like a wild west. People are more wild, more eastern culture, far behind us economically and culturally which was apparent during my visit to Balkans.
@@REgamesplayerDon't say your ignorant views about Balkan countries are thoughts by all Lithuanians. Balkans are great, economy, people, nature... Very few people think of that region as "wild".
P.S. I am Lithuanian, just a little more travelled than my ignorant country man spreading BS views. :-)
@@REgamesplayer Balkans are both to the East and West of Lithuania. In which world does it make sense to badmouth them by saying "more eastern"?
Are 20 years old members really considered to be "new"
Western Europeans still call us "former soviet" so we have a long way to go...still...
@@Blanka1100 I had a few older coworkers that were educated in that time. One of my coworkers told me she was the last year that had to learn Russian in the school, in Poland--she didn't seem happy about it. Life moves on, already younger generation didn't think about these things anymore.
It's relative.
@@seneca983 It is the same with Nato membership. My country joined in 1999 but for Americans and many Westerners we are "new" and "former soviet". It is like calling Germans "former"...you know who...It is high time everybody stopped looking at us throught Russia's eyes. We moved on and it was the best thing possible to do.
@@Blanka1100This is a very spot on comment! 👉🏼🎯
Spain and Portugal joined the EU in 1986, which makes it 18 years until 2004. Nobody called them „new members” in 2004… while it still occurs in 2024 - 20 years after the big expansion. But the „former nazis” observation is really acute - it has been 35 years since 1989, which is equivalent to 1980 vs 1945 🤯 Did anyone call Germans „former nazis” in 1980?
Time really seems to have accelerated in the recent decades… 35 years before 1945 was 1910 🤯! Can you imagine?!
that graph at 0:39 already highlights how our hungarian goverment has failed, we have barely grown economically
10 more years and Bulgaria will leapfrog you. Maybe Hungarians will wake up to how bad Orban is when they read the headline "Hungary now the poorest EU member state".
It's amazing how much damage Orban has done. Hungary should be in the perfect position to grow well, but he's cosying up to authoritarian Russia purely because of his ideology
@@TzvetozarCherkezov they wont. even now we see headlines that "romania has overtaken us in..." but these headlines are only getting to people who wouldn't vote for fidesz anyways. these headlines never make it to fidesz voters because our media landscape is corrupt.
Yup, for us Romanians it's crazy that we've caught up to Hungary... we've had a LONG line of incompetent and populist governments... we can see their blunders, how they're keeping us back, all our growth is from the private sector, despite the government. So... how bad actually is Orban??? And people keep voting for him, unbelievable
@@greyhound6686 I notice a lot of empty Rail Cars all over Balkan Nations Rail Yards.
It almost appears like the EU is exploiting Balkan Resources that were being domestically productive?
Could we be asking the EU if their Fiat Currency is worthy of losing sleep over?
Who needs who is one more way of saying it?
I love how you understand that it's actually Eastern and Central Europe, not just Eastern bloc like 90% of other youtubers
Huge congratz for getting noticed by the very reputable Arte tv channel
Hopefully the first of many collabs :)
@@IntoEurope Good spend of my broadcasting fee
I love seeing other contemt creators getting recognition
@@IntoEurope you dutch have scared the nation..when the international court issued an arrest warrant for the american president for iraq, you screwed up because the usa made it a law that if you arrest him, they can attack you militarily
I don't know about other countries, but for Croatia, I can say that from the 20s until now, most of the larger industrial companies have been sold off or destroyed due to bad management, without any indication that anything will improve. Croatia is heavily dependent on tourism and joining the EU has clearly increased the number of tourist arrivals and earnings from tourism. Croatia has a lot of illegal construction especially on the coast for tourism and other purposes due to corruption and illegal renting where individuals or individual families get rich, so that a lot of money disappears instead of going to the state treasury. Corruption is not decreasing, maybe is even getting a little worse. And not talking about the extreme exodus of people highly educated and uneducated, villages and smaller towns disappearing and low birth rates, it's a huge disaster waiting to happen. These problems are not negligible and do not appear to be improving any time soon.
I have the impression that the lack of births and the large exodus of people from the so-called Eastern Europe in the near future will have a catastrophic effect on everything from the economy to the quality of life.
Finally someone who isn't blindly praising only the advantages of the EU. Question: in your opinion the adoption of Euro helped or rather damaged the economy, in the sense that everything is more expensive now because of it.
Sounds like Croatia is eastern Portugal.
Of course birth rates are declining when it's the youth leaving, not the elderly. And it's already having a catastrophic effect.
@@MMerlyn91 It's not even a debatable question, you'll be hard pressed to find an honest person who doesn't think adopting Euro has mad everything more expensive. Everything is so obviously much more expensive now, the amount of conversations I've had about how expensive everything is now, it's through the roof, everyone is commenting on it. They'll point to salaries rising, but that's barely happening and definitely not catching up with the costs.
@@joschmo4497 That's the thing, Euro made everything more expensive in every Western country, Italians and Germans both complained about this. Yet I've seen many Croats very vocal that it's not the case, which seemed suspicious to me. Same story with Baltics and Euro. These people would lie to themselves and everyone else rather than admit a mistake, I know their kind, most of Romanians are the same way. And this bothers me because I think that the switch to Euro will also be pushed here and I'm completely against that.
love how Croatia isn't mentioned once, because the only thing thats grown is our politicians pockets lmao...
Croatian GDP rose by 23% from 2019 to 2024, so they are doing something right
Dont forget the inflation countrymen.
That something is tourism
@@red_orange2971 diing ... wrong, inflation meanwhile rose 50% minimum, and wages ... 15-20%, all griftonomical data.
I dont know where you guys live but before 10 years it was so bad that it couldnt been worse. Today, ok, inflation is everywhere but there is a feeling that money is going around. Da neko kaže da je prije 10 godina bilo bolje, to može samo hrvatski sklop u glavi koji vidi samo crnjak. Dabas možeš raditi i zaraditi. Ako danas ne možeš u hrv uspjeti, onda osobno nećeš nigdje.
One slight manipulation in otherwise very interesting video - capitals being richer than rest of the country and therefore poorer than EU average is not eastern EU phenomenon - only Germany, Netherlands and few other smaller countries have regions richer than EU average.
Even France has this "empty belt" in the middle 🤷
Italian regions of Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia Romagna and Trentino Alto Adige are in the list, too.
I remember going to Croatia on vacation as a kid with my parents very fondly. It was a pleasant and an affordable location. Having recently spent our summer vacation there with my wife, I was shocked how expensive everything was. There’s literally no incentive for me to pick it over Italy now since it costs the same. And I find Italian cuisine better and I also prefer sandy beaches to pebble beaches. I’m sorry to say it but I believe Croatia overshot the mark with those prices.
@@thiscordd8067 It did. Everybody is complaining, both the natives and the tourists. Croatia fucking sucks. I say that as a Croatian.
I am a Dutchman and I've been living in the Czech Republic. Czechia is not catching up with the Netherlands and there are more and more poor people here. Actually, there was a recent publication in Euronews saying that the gap between the rich and poor countries in the EU widens, so that means the opposite of what we here in this video. Wealth of nations: Gap between rich and poor in Europe widens
The Czech Republic has already overtaken all European countries (in terms of the lives of their citizens) and is now the best country in Europe.
I'm from Portugal.
I live in Estonia.
Short answer: yes
Long answer: yes, because Western Europe is a bit stagnant.
I said this before I saw the video.
I was kinda right.
is finding a job in portugal difficult?
@@gizemlikisi6213No, but you will get paid peanuts😂
Are you in tech or “normal” job? How much are you getting? Do they accept English or you need to know their language right away?
Asking for a friend 😉
Portugal- Were you retire under the sun😂
@@santostv. you guys also have a housing crisis as well right? as I know cost of living there so high
Finally someone who makes a sensible video instead of copying dumb "Poland BIG!" nonsense. Until those countries create their own IPs and companies they will be locked in problem of having a work force to expensive for direct investments and not productive enough to grow further
Very true, at this rate most of eastern europe will fall into the middle-income trap like czechia. It still lacks sizeable domestic companies which can compete with the west. Most figures on future growth are based on growth not decelerating, which will also happen as their economies grow.
"Work force too expensive" in Eastern Europe. Is this an alternate-reality thing?
@@MMerlyn91 have you seen the wage hike that happened last two decades? Countries like Poland or Czech Rep start being to expensive. Few production facilities already closed their factories in Poland (eg. Levis, Fiat or Michelin). Corporate jobs are also under question with companies transferring processes to India
@@MMerlyn91 actually at this specific point things are quite different from what it was 20 years ago. also situation in these countries also differs from each other, for example minimum wage in Poland is now 1000 eur, meanwhile in Bulgaria 477. It's not that profitable for companies to build factories in Poland anymore
@@Lamoa29 there is no middle income trap if you don't adopt the same economic policies like the western countries. For example: progressive income tax, high taxes for business, big welfare state, high debt created by a national pensions system, high minum wage and unsustainable national health care.
Eastern Europeans works hard, no doubt about it
From my experiences, Eastern Europeans work many hours, but their work is very inneficient and they still have that mindset that good worker stays in work for at least 12 hours, that's why they are still poor, their economy is based on cheep and very inneficient work, their owners don't invest, they just order more hours to solve the problem. We were also working like that before covid here in Czechia, thankfully, at least something got better here, especially because of our very low unemployment, when your wokrers say they will be working "only" 8 hours, you can't fire them because you will not find any new people on work market.
We have some conflicts with romanians and ukrainians here in Czechia because of that, because native people deny to work more than 8 hours and weekends, but these workers from east vice versa want to work like that for some reason we don't understand.
@@Pidalin I can't agree more. More doesn't always mean better, if there are more accidents and less quality is counterproductive
@@Pidalin Yaiks we in Lithuania work 8h per day usually and if it's 12h then we work 2 days and rest 2 days honestly we just work 40h per week.
@@eveningabused5123 Lithuania is not real eastern europe, your culture and history is western. BTW, I was working exactly like that for years - 2 days of 12h shift and 2 free days and I didn't like it because I worked most of weekends and holidays so when you want to go somewhere with friends, you can't.
@@vincenzoc.1781 I was doing 12h shifts and thank to some optimalisations, now we can do even more during standard 8h shift.
No one in Eastern Europe expects that we will ever catch up with West European countries nor is it something that we care about, but it's undeniable that EU integration is pretty much the best thing that has happened to Eastern Europe since the end of WW2, especially for those of us who are old enough to remember what life was like before the 2000s.
Good to hear it's working out relatively well. Certainly if one looks East beyond the EU things look a lot less good yet, it's good many nations managed to avoid the outcomes seen in the various countries there.
Almost in every country of the world life has become better since 2000s. It has nothing to do with the EU.
@@Murmilone Indeed it has, but not all countries saw similar improvements.
In this case one can compare to the countries to the East and notice that a rather clear divide in development has occurred. This is especially stark as some of those countries started off in a better position originally economically. So EU countries caught up and surpassed such countries. So pretty obviously the EU did have some pretty positive outcomes economically.
It has also stability wise really helped out quite a lot, as one can once again see by looking out East of it. The difference is pretty stark in how calm EU countries are on average compared to the non-EU ones to the East.
Another interesting factor has been, that while in much of the world many a country ends up stuck in a middle income trap situation, this has not happened so far I've been able to identify in the EU, with countries growing cleanly through it to more developed economic status.
Overall it is as such hard to not see the EU having been very helpful for many countries futures.
In Czechia, life in 90s was maybe better than today with cost of living crisis. I am glad I was a kid still in normal days, today parents have problem to find kingergarten and schools for their kids, they pay more than one salary for rent and streets are not safe anymore.
I am not saying I want that time back, some things are much better now - cities are restored, everything look pretty good, but as an ordinary person, you don't feel that profit in your wallet, it got much worse after 2020 and this government is full of clowns who have no idea how ordinary people live. When they speak about not increasing salaries of politicians or judges this year (so it stays at like 150 000 CZK), they are angry and want to protest, but ordinary person lives with like 25-30 000 CZK and rent of flat is also 25-30 000 CZK. This government will fall and populists will win and I don't know what is worse.
There are certainly a fair few people that that have noticed there was a period of instability with the pandemic, supply chain disruption and war, causing quite a few issues, yeah.
Hopefully the problems caused in those years can over time be more fully fixed. Though I'm not sure one can really blame the current government for a fair bit of those larger scale problems. Some times one gets handed a bad hand for a bit.
I guess it's fortunate that at least their were reserves to work with to help some what bridge the times, I wouldn't want to imagine what would happen with out it...
Hopefully things won't go all populist because of it though, yeah... I don't think many of them really have any kind of solution to things. They're different... but that isn't always a good thing.
Well Slovenia now got 53 287 dollars of the GDP PPP per capita by the estimates for the 2024. While Japan got 54 184 dollars of the GDP PPP per capita for the 2024. So yeah. Something really big has happened with the development of the ex communist Europe.
Yes, Slovenia is doing good.
Eh, Slovenia is one of the exceptions.
If you ask slovenians everything is horrible and we are dying from starvation
@@Potatoarmy12 Maybe that's the type of mentality that propels you forward without you even being aware of it.
@@Potatoarmy12 Same with Croats. Such is the mentality. If gold were falling from the sky, they would find something to complain about.
I think it depends on what individual country we're discussing.
Noooo man you dont understand the east of europe at all, they are all exactly the same culturally and economically
@examplenameyoutube In some aspects, we are. E.g. we do understand sarcasm.
@@joseferiksson2281 We're not the same at all. We have different economy mix, for example. Poland has really mixed economy and isn't dependent on automotive industry as much as Czech Republic or Hungary, but we have big problems with green electricity, because most of power we get is from coal. This simple example shows that our countries are similar, but can encounter different problems in the future.
Maybe we have a lot of similar advantages, but we have different disadvantages.
@@czarun9437ever heard of sarcasm?
Hungary doesn't seem to be doing too well. I'm happy for places like Poland and Estonia though!
People think they are some of the poorest countries in the world but the opposite is true, they are some of the richest. By most metrics they are going to be in the top 50 out of the worlds 200 countries
Eastern Europe is only poor in western world standards, however yeah they’re still one of the richest in the world standards
@@Crimson19977 Even during communism east europe was only poor compare to west europe ,but comapre to 80% off the rest off the world was actually Ritch .I lived in communist country Yugoslavia and we had everything average person in west had ,just maybe some new technological stuff they would get few years earlier
They are in top 50, all of them except maybe for Bulgaria.
Yes. Many of my fellow countrymen still hide behind that "we're small and poor, insignificant" nonsense. It's partly dejection induced in people by the decades of totalitarian regime, partly just laziness. "Don't expect anything of us, just give us money." I often feel ashamed of how many people like that we have. (And then they fill their cars with beer and go spend their fully paid holiday at their cottage or by the sea... Hypocrites.)
People think the opposite. But it's actually the opposite of the opposite. It's not that extreme you were thinking about but the other extreme.
This is the first time I've seen a TH-camr being sponsored by arte. What an achievement!
I think it's worth emphasising that convergence is already pretty much a fact - Poland, Czechia, Lithuania and Slovenia are already ahead of Portugal and Greece. Slovenia is also ahead of Spain, with Poland being just 6% behind Spain, and Czechia 3%. That's 2-4 years until we catch up with recent growth tendencies.
More over, Slovenia will catch up with New Zealand and Japan next year (minimal difference). Italy is the next goal.
(All values are GDP per capita PPP, IMF 2024 estimate)
Who cares about PPP lmao, in that flawed logic Turkey is prosperous
@@denizaydemir6756 Everybody cares about PPP. Because you may earn $1 million /month in a country but be poorer than other countries if a loaf of bread is $500.000 there. But I suppose that is hard to understand for some people.
@@RaduRadonys You're absolutely right. But I think Denizay Demir here is Turkish and thinks that *Turkey's* standing in the ranking is unreasonably high. It's difficult for me to verify, but it's a wide belief that Turkey has had tremendous economic problems in recent years. Plus, I did notice that Turkish people are very high in the list of nationalities who receive work permits in Poland, and it puzzled me why would they choose a country not so much richer than themselves. India, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan I understand... but Turkey?
@@RaduRadonys none cares about the PPP. the US is the first economy, but if you look at the GDP (ppp) American is second to China. The GDP (PPP) is an eastern european obsession, but it's almost impossible to calculate it (it's just a poor estimate about earnings/cost of the goods)
_Comparing the economies of countries based on GDP is like trying to compare the milk yields of cows based on the swarm of mosquitoes around them._
*GDP is calculated by different sectors:*
primary (mining, farming),
secondary (manufacturing, building),
tertiary (services, tourism, education).
At the end of 2022, the US GDP was $25 trillion,
including the primary sector - 1%,
the secondary sector - 19%
and the tertiary sector - 80%.
China's GDP was $18T,
with primary - 7%,
secondary - 40%
and tertiary - 53%.
Japan's GDP was 4.2T,
primary - 5%,
secondary - 20%
and tertiary - 75%.
Russia's GDP was $2.2T
primary - 20%,
secondary - 70%
and tertiary - 10%.
In total, in Russia, primary and secondary account for 90%, in China - 47% and in the US and Japan - 20-25%. The ratio of extractive vs manufacturing is much worse in USA than in Russia.
America's economy is heavily dependent on services, which is why it's called the "Zombie Economy".
*How can Russia possibly lose a war against the West in this scenario?*
why are you so afraid of what Poland will do?
Dlaczego piszesz jako "afraid"? Nikt się niczego tu nie boi, a to raczej my powinniśmy się bać bo skutki ewentualnego PolEXITu byłyby dla nas katastrofalne.
@@endrju9732lepszy polexit niż spedalenie państwa i oddanie całego suwerenu niemcom.
@@endrju9732wy i tak nie macie elity rzadzacej, ani zdefiniowanego interesu narodowego. Nikt nie jest w stanie powiedziec jaki jest plan i co jest interesem narodowym. Na nastepne 5, 10 czy 30 lat.
Ale to dla was ok jak np. Partie ida do wyborow bez programu, albo go kompletnie nie realizuja. Wy i tak glosujecie na te same partie.
Eastern Europe is catching up with Western Europe because Western Europe is stagnating
good job you watched the video!
it's like the rise of India or China.
if you're starting at the bottom of a list chances are you're going to be better in the future.
but if you're already at the top, you can't really rise anymore.
every country has a max amount of GDP it can produce, they are constrained by population size, land mass, geography etc.
and Western Europe has had (at least) a 50 years head start on Central and Eastern Europe. but that also means Western Europe is much closer to the top of possible high point.
@indi353 most of us knew that even before the video. No surprize there.
And because Western Europe is paying billions to Eastern Europe lol
@@ChristiaanHW The British Empire feared Asian Unity,
The USA now is looking at a BRICS Wall,
that shields 70% of available resources.
The Balkans look at Asia and the resources that are produced there.
They compare the European Union,
who seem to have consumed the available domestic sources until all profits were dug up and consumed.
The G-7 created a lifestyle on Exploitation of Colonial Empires
The USA has been attempting to operate a World Empire.
Like a Crooked cop policing the world,
shaking down Merchants for "Protection Money"......
Janet Yellen as Gangster Granny,
saying "Put it in the Bag!"
The effort of operating a Family Industry
does tend to cost a lot?
So the Balkans look at Orban,
they say,
"Who should we go with?"
The G-7 needs Resources,
the BRICS Guys have resources.
Tough Choice?
The European map in the background looks so fancy! Do you know where to buy one?
Honestly it looked like something he may have painted himself.
I do hope Eastern Europe gets its day in the sun and start to become economic powerhouses themselves and become model EU nations. They’ve borne the brunt of so much destruction over the past several centuries. Their populaces deserve better. Then again, the populace of Western Europe deserves better from its politicians as well.
Im a Pole working in a sector getting people to Netherlands.
You can forget that u will get educated normal people here.
Even students for holiday work are difficult
What about house prices?
200k euro and in Poland get u a house with a garden
Here maybe a garage
Spearate Baltic States, they weren't even mentioned in this video.
Estonia and Lithuania have been mentioned once. But yes we are always abused :-)
@@expert69able It's cause we are smaller and they don't pay attention to us even though we are one of the most developed in eastern europe.
Baltic states aren’t Eastern Europe. Perhaps that’s why
@@karkevicius Yep - Baltic states is North Europe!
Hero stalking about lasers in Lithuania
Bear in mind a lot of the "Romania is becoming an economic powerhouse" youtube videos are made by some indian editors who've done no research and have their scripts written by chat-gpt. Someone is paying for those videos.
Why would someone pay for such videos??? What could someone possible gain from praising a random country? LOL :)) they are doing it for the views, since Romania has a large population and really good Internet many Romanians watch TH-cam. That's it.
@@RaduRadonys romania isnt that marketable. Romanians dont speak as much english as citizens of other countries and foreigners are very disinterested in romania. You also see it in statistics whenever someone makes a graph and they can't display every country romania is one of the first to get dropped, even if neighbours like hungary get included.
@@spamspam541 I mean 50% of the population still lives in villages and small towns, of course they don't bother learning english. But in the big cities most of the people know english pretty well I would say. Go to France, Italy or Spain in the big cities and you will see a lot of them can't speak english, even in Germany there are still many people that can't speak english. While it's true that foreigners aren't interested in moving to Romania, many foreign companies and businesses do, mainly because of the big and growing I.T sector in big cities, one of the fastest internet speeds in the world and a significant trained young population in programming. So yeah the problem is wealth distribution, 50% that live in rural areas are considered poor (despite many of them living happy in farmlands and nature) and the other 50% in big cities are somewhat wealthy in PPP standards. The government failed us but at least we got the private sector that it's booming.
@@bodi3793 even the IT sector in romania is overrated af. We are really far behind in anything technology related.
@@spamspam541 So you are Romanian. No wonder that you leave nasty comment about Romania, it's written in many Romanian DNA to say shit about their own country. It's quite pathetic to be honest.
This is an underated channel.
Instant Like for the Arte sponsorship.
💶💵Money flowing from EU subsidies is not the most important thing. The most important thing for Poland was to be able to join the common economic market.
Maybe we would develop if Croatia did not have the same party in Power the entire time since our independence(HDZ) which is also legally convicted crominal organization
Yeah cool story, the other side is infinitely worse. What happened when SDP and Milanović were in charge? Oh right, a sh1t ton of money spent on god knows what. The problems are much deeper than that.
@@joschmo4497 you cant compare a party that was in power for 4 years with a party that has been in power for 20 years.
the best party that could lead croatia would be Domovinski Pokret without HDZ
@@CroatianUltraNationalist Yeah you can, they're the worst clowns imaginable aside from Možemo.
Agreed on DP, I personally voted for them, but I expected this outcome realistically. Better that they get some power than none of the power.
@@joschmo4497 god help us if Možemo ever comes to power.
HDZ is terrible and corrupt but if možemo comes to power we can say goodbye to croatian culture and family values forever.
Your map is wrong on so many levels. Even Ustashe ultranazis in WWII didn't manage to implement such large Croatia (with Dalmatia, whole Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Serbia)
I find some of your statements a bit strange. For instance Czechia has a per capita income this year of around 30.000 euro, that's far far to high to be called a middle income country anymore. Middle income countries would love to be that well off. So it seems pretty obvious the Czechs are managing to transition to a developed economy, they aren't even that far behind Germany anymore which very strongly indicates they are converging.
Just like if one actually looks at the economic data it is pretty clear West Europe isn't stagnating but Eastern Europe is still catching up anyway.
Though strangest of all is to say the EU is an economic venture first, when it very clearly has been a political venture first. One can find that even in the founding statements of the EU. It's why even though at times things were difficult they worked through some of those difficulties rather then just cheap out. Long term this has seemed for the better for everyone as well, with better stability and prosperity for all then one could have otherwise expected. One but need look over the border to see alternate outcomes after all.
Yes, we Czechs have nothing to bitch about, although that won't stop us to do so, constantly... ;-) It's in our nature.
Just note that we were a developed country from the very beginning. Between the wars (what we call the 1st republic), Czechoslovakia was an European tiger, we were better off than many (south-)western European countries. The 40 years of totalitarian regime and nonsensical economical model devastated the wealth (and, most importantly, the mentality of the people), but we had a solid base to return to, it wasn't like we had to develop the economy from scratch. That wasn't quite the case with other post-Soviet or Soviet-affiliated countries. Comparatively, e.g. to Romania, we're sloppy, we could do much better.
Live standards in the Czech Republic are pretty good. But our strategic vulnerability is economic dependence on Germany and the automotive sector. If either one of those pillars falls apart then we are screwed. Germany will survive without us, but we won't survive without Germany. Unless we quickly diversify our economy away from Germany and towardd the United States, Eastern Europe and Asia.
gdp per capita huh?
theres so much more to standards of living than that. Poland for example has a lower gdp per capita than Czechia but a higher infrastructure and road quality rating. In fact the czechs have literally the lowest infrastructure rating of all neighbouring countries including Slovakia which is supposed to be kind of worse than you
or for example inequality of wealth. In Czechia 37.8% of wealth is held by the top 1% of people. You are not too far off from russia where 50% of wealth is held by the 1%. In Poland its only 22.8%, meaning the gdp per capita is more equally distributed. We are in fact excelling in that regard compared to all of europe, and as we all know wealth distribution is very important.
i'd advise you not to be satisfied with what you have and strife for greater heights
@@nexor7809 I completely agree, we Czechs have "fallen asleep on our laurels" as we put it. Countries like Poland and even Romania are poorer than us on paper but have much better economical momentum. We should take a leaf out of your book.
@@nexor7809 I personally brought up GDP per capita due to the video suggesting for some odd reason that Czechia was a middle income country.
Of course in practise there are more factors, but those were thus beyond the direct scope of my point.
Though I would like to note things like wealth inequality can be difficult to properly calculate for countries like Russia where much of the wealth at the top isn't actually known due to the corruption covering it up. This often tends to make such countries wealth inequality seem less high then it actually is. So I'd suspect the top 1% actually might hold substantially more yet there.
Sorry for bad english, my wife's boyfriend is from eastern europe
Nice
Nice
Your wifes boyfriend is a big burly bulgarian man
We are sorry for the bad English, but don't despair, there still are also some pretty decent people in England...
Based
(From memory) I think the areas in the UK that received EU money generally voted for Brexit.
True. Small poor cities/towns voted out. They were manipulated but still what a irony 😂 meanwhile big cities that didn’t get much funding were voting to stay.
Hello from Romania. So here's a few things that I often think people have a bit of a bad take on:
- development happening mostly in the capital - that's true to some extent, but not to the extend most content creators make it out to be. It is understandable though why this is the case with content creators: the statistics invariably do point out to a disproportionate level of development for the capital region compared to the rest. But here's the catch: the territorial unit of the capital either has no or barely any rural area in its composition, as opposed to any of the other territorial administrative denominations. It shouldn't be a mystery to anyone that cities produce a way higher wealth per capita compared to rural areas - a phenomenon that isn't at all unique to Eastern Europe, but that is happening everywhere. In actual fact, large cities across the territory have extremely close living standards, wages, productivity and GDP/capita to that of the capital, but it wouldn't appear so because they're never considered in those statistics with the same proportion of urban to rural people. I'll give the example of our capital, Bucharest, and our biggest cities other than the capital, which are Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara, Iasi, Constanta, Craiova, and the Galati-Braila area (these are two medium sized cities that are within 10km of each other). Of those, Cluj-Napoca (only the metro area, not including the county outside the city+suburbs) is essentially at somewhere around 95% to 100% of Bucharest's level on all accounts. Timisoara sits between 90% and 95%, Iasi 85% to 90%, with the others still being somewhere above 70%-75% of the capital's per capita average level of economic activity. In fact, the issue at least in my country (but I have an inkling that it's the same across the entire former communist Europe) is that the countryside is extremely left behind, and the newly found economic prosperity did not yet have time to spill over there as well, still being concentrated in the major cities and their metro areas.
- the brain drain - actually, there are clear signs that people are beginning to return. The only thing is the phenomenon isn't happening at such a tremendous rate as to overtake the emigration that is still happening, but the net emigration, which has always resulted in a loss of population for us every year since the fall of communism, has essentially been halving every year since approximately 2017. For the more developed former communist countries, this started earlier, as early as 2010 in Czechia. There is, of course, still a pull of Western Europe, of the organized, picture perfect societies, where all the welfare systems works properly, the order of things has long been established, and where ultimately there is more money. This pull isn't instantly going to go away, but over time fewer and fewer people will see the need to leave their country. This phenomenon is similar to what happened with Spain and Portugal and Greece several years after they joined the EU. Furthermore, there are decent indications that there will be far less brain drain happening in the following decades, as well as a certain amount of incoming immigration, both from the West and from outside of the EU. I don't believe our labor crisis is going to be as severe as some of the less hopeful prognoses are making it out to be.
- the convergence rate is a bit bloated by European statistics - this happens because the EU looks at PPP values, and not nominal ones. When Eurostat looks at GDP statistics, or average wage stats, and so on, they look at adjusted values for price levels. These result in Eastern Europe sitting between 70% and 90% of the EU average. However, if you consider that the price index in East EU sits between 57% to 70% of EU average in most East EU countries (Slovakia is a big exception on this), this should tell one that things aren't exactly as they are made out to appear. Take again my country, Romania: our price index for 2023 was 57% of EU average, the lowest in the EU, and our GDP PPP per capita sat at 78% of EU average. That means that if you unadjust for current prices (which may rise at any point because of any kind of inflation inducing shock, such as was the case for the war in Ukraine and the subsequent trade war with Russia), our actual value is 0.57 x 0.78 = 44.46% of the EU average, in nominal value. Now, obviously it does matter how much you can buy with a nominal amount, but in my opinion it is a bit more relevant to at least look at both values, not just the PPP value for GDP. Once you also look in nominal terms, you'll see that Czechia, the second wealthiest of the new EU members, which is presented in the Eurostat data as being virtually on the same level as Italy, actually barely sits at 70% of the Italian GDP per capita, and this should be a better explanation as to why Czechia is still a middle income economy rather than there being a magic trap that stops development. The gap is closing, both in price-adjusted terms as well as in nominal terms, but there is a longer way to go. :)
- there is one advantage in Eastern Europe that people never account for: several East European countries actually have some of the world's lowest gini coefficients. It's certainly not true for all (e.g. Romania and Lithuania and especially Bulgaria are significantly above the EU average in income inequality, although it has been decreasing since the pandemic years in Romania quite fast), but it is absolutely true for some - Slovakia, Slovenia and Czechia are the world champions in terms of lowest inequality. In fact, this low inequality is so relevant that is causes Slovenia, a country which is also reasonably developed otherwise, to find itself in the world top 10 countries ranked by the inequality-adjusted human development index. It is also the only country in that top 10 that does not have a world leading nominal GDP/capita. This low inequality results in lower levels of crime, more social solidarity, and just an overall higher quality of life than just looking at the GDP might otherwise suggest. These things will eventually lead to incoming quality immigration, that will boost the economies of these countries, but also to a higher degree of workforce participation of the available population (as everyone has more or less equal opportunities in education, housing, and so on).
So do I believe that eventually there will be more convergence? Absolutely yes, I think it's happening, but I think we'll need between 15 and 30 more years before we'll see Eastern EU being more uniformly developed with the west. However, it will take much less before at least some East EU countries will overtake Southern EU, because Southern EU has both a productivity and a supply chains problem, as well as disfunctionally high debt to GDP ratios and structural economic issues which the East does not have. Take just this small example: in Romanian public discourse, it is considered a huge problem that our debt to GDP is hoovering around 50%, and automatic debt reduction measures are triggered as soon as public debt rises past the 50% threshold. In the meantime, Spain's debt-to-GDP is 95%, France's is 98%, Portugal 117%, Italy 134% and Greece 168%! Naturally, higher debt-to-GDP doesn't automatically constitute a problem in and of itself as long as you can finance it at relatively low cost, but how long do we actually believe that the cost will be low for these countries? Maybe it will keep being for France and Italy, but the others? Not likely for so long. They'll have to go through austerity sooner or later, the likes of which will be alien to the East.
Bro, who's gonna read all of that? You crazy? Xd
Purchasing power is probably a nice concept to reach a cozy conclusion that hardworking Central Europeans are catching the sinking West as national entities a bit faster than the >20 000 USD per capita gap suggests. And the concept of regional contribution to GDP drives a wedge between the urban and rural areas quite nicely in the internal politics.
But the concept of regional GDP per capita (PPP) is methodologically a steaming pile of turd. Vilnius and Bratislava are not ahead of Sweden outside Stockholm or Finland outside Helsinki in terms of some imaginary purchasing power.
@@mattihalme81 No, I disagree, it's not an esoteric concept, it has its uses. Especially when it comes to assessing the value of services (but also goods) that cannot be transacted across borders, PPP is much more valuable than nominal. For example, when you buy a haircut, the price differs massively between having it in Paris, France or having it in Razgrad, Bulgaria, but the service is essentially the same - same man hours, same chemicals used, same amount of labor. Same goes for real-estate - you know how the price of real-estate is dependent on "location, location, location" - building habitation of a certain area is essentially the same whether it is located in central Amsterdam, NL or in Lublin, PL, despite the sell price being different. If the cost of energy is different in two different places, that should also be factored into the equation, especially when trying to compare living standards. But even when it comes to comparing GDP per capita, it can be useful; take, for instance, US healthcare, with its abysmal outcomes: it surely is expensive, but at the end of the day, in spite of having the highest per capita expenditure in the world on healthcare, the US population has an average life expectancy worse than Poland. Why is that? Well, because their expenditure finances a parasitic class of middlemen numbering in the low millions, namely the private insurance people, that bloat the incurred expenses for healthcare and cause the entire system to be inefficient. Yet when you add up the GDP of the USA in nominal terms, the so-called added value created by those ineffective middlemen actually adds up to GDP. And it's not a small amount - it's 17.3% of the entire GDP of the USA. If you'd adjust for purchasing parity, you'd get a much better term of comparison between, say, western Europe and the US, especially when it comes to health expenditure being factored.
So these services and goods do account for a large part of the economy, and it is frankly dumb to try to only evaluate them on a nominal basis. On the other hand, PPP has the disadvantage that not all goods and services are added up when calculating the basket of goods used to calculate the conversion into the purchasing power standard, never even mind the proportions used within the basket for the goods and services that do get factored. Of course, when trying to calculate the PPS, economists do try in good faith to choose a representative basket, but still, it is a relative measure at the end of the day, and even the value of this relative measure is different depending on what specifically you're trying to compare at any given time.
Then again, I'll bet you anything that if you were to remove all the monetary transfers received from the state budget by areas outside of Stockholm / Gottenburg / Malmo from Sweden, or areas outside of Helsinki & surroundings from Finland, which in essence do come from these more productive areas, you'd actually end up with Bratislava and Vilnius far exceeding those areas. But do keep in mind, they too subsidize development in Slovakia and, respectively, Lithuania - in the same way Stockholm does for Sweden and Helsinki does for Finland.
@@EurovisionESC I did and you should aswell :)
These inequality stats may turn out to be lies. For example, the official Gini for household income in Poland is 0.30, but the true one, based on research using income tax data, is 0.45, almost as high as in the US.
Well yeah some of those countries like Estonia Czechia or even Slovenia actually ARE getting better but the wages aren't really growing and for example a lot kf Czechs wanna same wages as germany but it's just not possible hmmmm I wonder why
@examplenameyoutube Same here in Poland.
@examplenameyoutube Nope, it's not utopian, it's simply reality. It may be frustrating and even unfair, but that's life. What's the alternative? I mean, nothing is stopping you from moving those 150 km westwards, if it really is so convenient... And that's the benefit of the EU membership. Nothing to complain about.
The Czech Republic has already overtaken all European countries (in terms of the lives of their citizens) and is now the best country in Europe. The Czech Republic has very good salaries, and the earnings are the same as in Germany if you take into account the cost of living
Some of the main reasons in descending order.
1 The fall of communism
2 Peace and Stability at last
3 On average we work harder than many people in Western Europe.
4 Joining organisations like EU or NATO
You forgot the huge subsidies from those lazy Western European tax payers pumping billions of euro into your countries, Poland alone has received more than 200 billion.
No! Bulgaria has failed miserably!!! The EU opened the borders and many people young and old left in search for better life. Most of them found it and stayed abroad. The Bulgarian lev is pegged to the EUR which worsened inflation with some months peaking at over 15%!!!!!! Our country became haven for poor Brits trying to buy cheap rural property and for western digital nomads working for FOREIGN companies. The only towns that are somehow developing are Sofia , Plovdiv and Varna while the rest of the country is literally dried up of people and industries. Not to mention the amount of EU funds that were stolen/misused by the Bulgarian government to try and fix the poor infrastructure across the country.
And by development I mean outsourcing foreign companies that establish themselves here for cheap labour and rent.
It's already 2024 and it's really disastrous.
It is important to set the right comparison, the peer group for EU's eastern countries might rather be other ex-sowjet republics...If we compare growth rates then, the convergence we have witnessed looks even more stunning. This underscores the importance of the free, shared market. Also, it is important to remember convergence is not a zero-sum game: a rising tide lifts all the boats. Great video thanks!
It's important to remember that since gaining the first independence at the end of WW1, most "Eastern European" countries were already converging with the rest of Europe, with often above average economic indicators. Like the Baltic states, ex.g. Latvia were around #7 in wealth pp and other proportional economic health statistics. It wasn't singled out as seperate "Eastern" Europe as today, it was just Europe of the period between the two world wars. Until occupation happened around 1939.
Unfortunately it cannot return to previous state sooner than 3-4 decades by reasonable projections. We cannot return to the past, just to keep on trying to catch up and finding our strengths.
As a Latvian i can say that this only affects the big cities - the regions and small towns are dying out. The progress is very minor or non-existant...
Thanks for the video update MUGA!
This is actually quite necessary for Eastern European countries to finally catching up..
with middle east ?
@@nicolaeadrian7882 well, Middle East has oil
@@nicolaeadrian7882 With the rest of Europe.
You actually believe that Western Europe has higher living standards than you? They don't. It's all in your head. They have higher prices, and migrants to pay for.
@@marcv2648 migrantion sure ... romania have on average the same prices like in gemrany and for alot of products even more ... .the ua imigrants when they left ua when russia first invaded said romania has swiss prices for stuff ffs ....nobody watend to take ceausescu down back then... he had to pay the debs so he did ... now we have 200b $ debs and we are losing population like there is not tomorow ... even if we leave eu/nato next year is way to late ... instead if going to 30m -40m ceausesucu times we are going to 10 m from 24m in 2100
Thank you for this video
I'm doing my part.
Slovenia is very nice and clean country!! greetings from 🇵🇱
GDP is a really flawed metric to base the living standards on(Ireland is an even better representation of that). Officials close to the government and management got rich in Romania but regular people don’t feel an improvement in their life and I can actually give myself as an example.
I am software engineer that got my first job in a German Automotive company, in Romania. I came in as a KDE open-source contributor and with some programming competition wins but my salary didn’t match that, it was 420 Euros/month, having money for rent and 2 weeks of food. The company profits were through the roof but our living standards were sh*t, even though it’s a job that pays well in countries like Germany or US. If you go on a drive through Romania, you can see that GDP is disconnected from people’s wellbeing
On the other hand there's very well paid jobs. My brother's wife works at a laser removal salon.. no training no nothing and she makes 9000 lei per month ( 1808eur after tax ).
It's all down to how lucky you are in finding the right job
That’s bizarre. Starting salaries for any sort of software engineer in Sofia are 2000lv and up (€1000) with experienced employees reaching up to 4000-5000lv (€2000-2500). Of course those are salaries for the capital city, but in many cases working remotely in a smaller town gives you similar numbers.
Check the Romanian minimum wage....
@@sticlavoda5632 what about it? It’s 4 times higher than the one from Russia and food prices in Russia and Romania are the same .
Ce competiții ai câștigat? Și eu am participat la olimpiada de informatică, dar n-am reușit să ajung la națională. M-am împotmolit la județeană. 😅
As a Bulgarian, no we're not. Any percentage gains in salary since 2021 have been curbstomped by inflation, which is twice as high.
It might not happen due to drastic demographic decline
Thats so sadly true, but there is a small hope it is possible that if the economy grows enough that people from Eastern Europe who migrated to western Europe will come back as job opportunities grow
@@Justicsgenie That won't help that much. The demographic decline won't be stopped by old people coming back---and they'll need their pensions, soon, too. It's either people starting to have more children on average (which is unlikely) or economical (im)migration. That's the simple fact of life and economy, like it or not.
@@Justicsgenie how long would that help these countries though? The people going back would be older some with children already. They would likely just add to the nations they left in the population not having new kids
Czech birthrate is the second highest in the EU
Eastern european countries also have a low GDP debt to gdp ratio
Bro Estonian prices aint the boom i would say g
cool, finally some realistic and pragmatic material 👍
It's wrong to talk about German centrist economies and lump in the Baltic states with rest of Eastern Europe. The Baltic states economies biggest export markets are the Nordics. For example 18 % of Estonia's exports go to Finland and 13 % to Sweden. Same is true to a less degree in Latvia and Lithuania.
From a perspective of someone born in Poland in 2005 I can just say that this country is completely different from what it was during my childhood. You can see plates saying that the project was cofunded by the EU everywhere.
What? Your childhood was about the year 2010. Things were already pretty normal by then. I was growing up in the 1990s, and I can really see the difference, then vs. now.
Same, 95 for me, difference is staggering
chill bro... u got some 5% at best from the money western companys are making in poland and u will also lose half of the pop. till 2100... poland is gonna have 10 100y+ retired ppl left in the country because Eu .... no eastern country should had joined eu/nato clowns at all... its a total exploatation and modern colonization ... the majority of poland factorys are not even polish owned ...99% of the profits go to germany made by bad paid polish workers
I was growing up in the 80s in Poland. The place has changed a lot, joining the EU was the best they could have happened.
@@lordwiadro83 I realise that but there's still a big difference between how it was 2005-2010 and how it is now. Didn't want to insult anyone born before me, it's just my perspective. Also I come from a small village where most changes happened later than in urban areas.
Hey @IntoEurope, just a side note. It's not eastern, it's Central Europe. Always has been, despite iron curtain 😊
Central Europe is a geographical term. Eastern Europe is a (correct) geo-political term---and the video was about that. Don't be ashamed of coming from Eastern European country (one that used to be behind the Iron Curtain). It was bad, but it's undeniably our history (and the historical experience does also have its positives, especially now).
@@vaclavkrpec2879 no it's not, and im not ashamed of that, no idea why are you implying that. Central Europe is historcal, cultural, political region of Europe. The west-east division comes from cold war period. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe?wprov=sfla1
Tbh geo concept does not make sense to me. Europe 'ends' on Ural mountains which is much futher than Atlantic coast from PL, CZE, SLO or HUN
@@asdasasdasasdas Well, modern history matters more in this context, I think… And good for you for not being ashamed; I only suspected that because I heard too many people saying things like “_we_ are not like those Eastern Europeans, we’re *central*…” which is deplorable IMO…
@@vaclavkrpec2879 Iron Curtain is long gone. Those terms are obsolete. There is no reason to believe in any means: culturally, financially, geopolitically countries like Portugal and Sweden have more in common with each other than let's say Germany and Czechia, because Iron Curtain existed.
@@blinski1 Of course the legacy is still here. 30 years is nothing. Even the difference between former west and east Germany is still present, go and ask Germans. Go and try to breathe the air in Germany in the winter and then try in Poland. We in the east still feel the burden of the devastation of our countries that the decades of communism brought about. You can’t just click a switch and get rid of that. And most importantly, the devastation of minds of whole generations of people; that’ll take yet another generation to clear out, at least.
Poland had grown faster during the 10-year period BEFORE it joined the EU than in any 10-year period after that. Joining EU meant that stablished Western European companies could easily block emergence of Eastern European Tencents or Samsungs.
Dacia
@@stevens1041 How global is Dacia?
00:25 Former East Germany should also be red, I never got why East Germans who lived under the same system as Poles and Bulgarians are somehow counted as "Western Europeans", people still build large Commie blocs in Brandenburg as they do in Romania or Russia. Culturally speaking, East Germany is still an Eastern European country.
Sorry, we will switch to building cardbox homes to be culturally like you
@examplenameyoutube That's more of a german problem rather than east german problem.
Bad influence from Russian communism.The Germans are very disciplined people and bad influence has changed them for the worst.
Western Europe should invest in the Central and Eastern European countries instead of investing in China, India, Russia etc which are Eu rivals, since the Europeans can work freely and once these countries catch up with the Western countries they will became net contributors to the EU's budget. The are more than 150 million people living in the "New Europe" + Ukraine, Serbia, N. Macedonia etc 2x UK population, this could mean a $7 trillion (compared to $2.5 trillion as it is now) economy, if per capita is the same as UK's! basically $4.5 trillion could be generated if they converge with Uk's per capita in nominal terms for the European economy.
😂😂😂
Not sure what the UK has to do with this, but I agree with the central concept of investing within the union and the countries on the accession list, instead of off shoring to Asia.
5:22 wow so Poland can into space, nice!
This video is spot on. Czech Republic is excellent on paper, but it has severe limitations to growth and there are unsolved factors that can halt the economy.
1. The middle income trap is very real
2. Overreliance on export, economic dependence on Germany and automotive sector
3. Lack of innovation and government investment in infrastructure
4. Destructive neo-marxist policies pushed from the EU that can threaten national security and energy security.
Personally, I am a fan of leaving the EU and creating a new block under the leadership of Poland (Intermarium), based on traditional Christian values and self reliance in strategic areas (food, energy, immigration, defence). Eastern Europe needs to lower dependence on Germany and France and cooperate more with the United States and Asia.
Points 1, 2, and 3 are spot on, but I can't agree with 4, nor with your idea of greater cooperation with US and Asia. It was exactly the common EU approach to secure gas after Putins invasion that allowed us to heat our homes, albeit rather more expensively. And as to national security---ask Ukrainians how it is not to be part of a bigger alliance. The US (especially under Trump) are highly protectionist, the cooperation would be much more uneven than within the EU. We'd lose a lot, not a great idea. And look at where did Zeman's attempts for cooperation with China ended up---our businesses just lost IP and there was nothing. Utter shambles. Not to mention that in economics, distance matters...
I do agree that we should cooperate more with Poland (and generally with our close neighbours)---but not to ditch Germany or the EU but simply to extend and diversify the international cooperation we have. As to traditional Christian values---forgive me, but 1/ they have nothing to do in business and 2/ in our, pretty atheistic country, I think you're knocking on the wrong door. I'll pass on that, anyway.
The problem is the Czech Republic hitched its wagon to Germany. Germany has no future. Well they have a future, but it is a future of decades more industrial decline, social strife and eventual acceptance of Sharia. Your point 4 is also spot on. It is the root cause of Europe's long decline.
@@marcv2648 Yes, Marxism is German invention. They exported it to Tsarist Russia in order to weaken it. It worked surprisingly well, better than anybody expected. Russia could have become a world superpower number one after WWI, but instead it collapsed after 70 years, rotting from within.
Now Germany is destroying its own country by their own ideology. The cancer of Marxism spreads unfortunately throughout Western universities and the whole Western world.
For the love of god adopt the short "Czechia" name already or put "republic" at the end of every other country name too!
The UK could do with that, certainly... ;-) Spain?
The thing is---it just sounds weird, you know. I did (grudgingly) start to use the short name, but it still doesn't sound right. Even the Czech "Česko" sounds a little odd. That's the only reason we still often use the official, long name.
No offense but Chechia sounds weird at best to the non Czech speakers. Czech Republic is much more fluent and natural.
@@mlyntoThe Czech republic is the name of the criminal organisation (the state). The name of the country is Czechia
People in this part of Europe are sensitive to basically just 2 issues 1. uncontrolled migration from third world and 2. other countries looking down on them. These 2 issues converged in 2015 during migration crisis into a perfect storm during which western politicians called people from eastern EU everything on a spectrum from "backwards" through "uneducated" to "nazis" when overwhelming consensus amongst people was NO to open borders and local politicians acted on this (for once they did what people wanted). Protect Shengen borders and cut that "we know better" bullshit and there will be no Ficos, Orbans or Polexits.
No, that countries from central and eastern Europe converged certainly didn't caused Italian massive debt problem and didn't cause your productivity to be that low. How is that it affected only Italy? (it's only my opinion I very open to discussion)
Keep up the good work🇪🇺🫶
I suppose Orbán gets economy lessons from Putin, that’s why Hungary’s economy doesn’t work 😂
I like the way Putin ruins his supporters. But I don't like the rest of Putin at all.
Why this film at all? And what's the question at the end? It all depends on what the EU will be . Poland does not intend to stop developing nor does it intend to pay into the EU forever in situation where it will not have any power or for example, and the EU will make decisions that hit the economies of countries like Poland. If the EU blocks this development, then there will probably be such thoughts.but other countries will probably come out faster too . Generally, Europe does not have a great future without big European project in long term but it also does not have it with the screwed up European project with screwed up oligarch where feudal systems decide not meritocracy and live detached from reality elites that generate more problems than benefits for Europe.
I'm Polish and lemme tell you. I have eastern salary, but in many cases prices are higher than in germany.
As a train driver i made 19000€ gross per year, which is 12560€ net.
And all that with 2-3 days overtime per month. Meanwhile renting a room price increased by 2x and renting an 30m2 apartment would require from me 700€ net per month
Is Eastern Europe as deep in debts as Western Europe?
Nope.
Mostly, we aren't. Here in Czech Republic, the debt-to-GDP ratio is quite low. But that's not necessarily that important. What really matters is how well you're able to repay the debt, not the debt in absolute numbers. Look at the US; they've the biggest national debt in the world _by far_, but they're doing just fine.
If you borrow money to have a luxury dinner, that's a bad, dead debt. But if you borrow money to buy a car to be able to commute to a better job, that's an investment that pays back... Not quite the same on state level of course, but the principle holds. Borrowing money to improve infrastructure, invest into science, education, R&D and so on is beneficial. If you borrow to spend more on pensions, _then_ you're in trouble.
@@vaclavkrpec2879 USA is not doing good in all honesty.
@@eveningabused5123 The US is doing far better than Europe and has been for the past 15 years. It’s the fastest growing developed economy by far, growing 2 times faster than Western Europe. Americans earn the highest disposable incomes in the world and are far richer than Europeans. US GDP Per Capita of $86,000 is 70% higher than France or the UK and 55% higher than Germany
Unlike Europe, the US has high birth rates because people can afford to have more kids, houses are bigger=more room for a large family. And people move out at a younger age in America vs Europe due to cheaper costs of living relative to income levels. America has a rapidly growing population while western Europe has a rapidly aging and stagnant/declining population.
US poverty rate is 11%, which is comparable to Western Europe. And US homelessness rate is 0.17% or 600,000 out of 340 million people. Which is half the homelessness rate of the UK
All in all, the US has far greater growth potential than Europe. And the economic gap between the US and Europe will only grow wider as Europe is growing at about half the speed of the US
@@vaclavkrpec2879 National debt isn’t a bad thing so long as a country doesn’t default. It’s an investment into the country’s future growth. China’s growth has largely been due to investment through taking on debt, that’s why they have a 300% total debt to GDP ratio which is even higher than the America’s 250% total debt to GDP
There’s a few European countries that have higher national debt and total debt than the US as well. Like Italy or Portugal for example. Germany is also very close to the US in total debt to GDP ratio (250% vs 235%)
The transformation of Romania and Poland, to give only two examples, has been incredible. Even if they were to stagnate completely, the progress in just one generation has been impressive. In the 1990s, most of Eastern Europe was starting with bankruptcy and a complete collapse in industry. My feeling is that most of Eastern Europe was forced into change. Western Europe, for the most part, is wealthy enough to postpone change. Some Western European nations have an economic model that would have been perfect for 1985, but struggles in the age of the smartphone, where information flows immediately and any stupid policy can result in money being moved away in seconds, rather than months or years. Not all of Western Europe is struggling--Netherlands, for instance, has an almost trillion dollar economy. The future of Germany, France and Italy presents some major obstacles. And then there is Belgium.
>new members
>some of these are there since 2004
how long does one need to be part of an union to stop being "the new one"?
having even newer ones. You dont stop beeing the younger one just because you are old, you are the younger because there are older
@@afonsoabreu5144 According to your flawed logic Austria, Sweden and Finland are new members of EU. Just like Spain or Portugal is. Or Greece. Just because there are older ones. Right?
They still call us "former soviet" as well. Nice, right? It is like calling Germans "former...you know who..."
@@Grzegorz_Grabowski bro wtf. They are newer than germany, but they are NOT the newer members. Stop creating problems where they dont exist ffs
@@Grzegorz_Grabowski Dude, Eastern Europe countries are the NEWEST! If a family has 10 children, they wouldn't say the 5th one is the young one, but the 10th will always be the youngest. It's not hard to understand really.
Excellent Analysis as always! CY is not included in your painting 🖼️:)
Why do you add the Baltic Countries in your map if you do not talk at all about them? Lithuania for example, already has higher GDP/capita than Spain
This is not true, Spain still has a higher GDP per capita, and it is also worth looking at, for example, GDP in the context of ownership structure, 10% of Lithuanian GDP is generated by one foreign company (Orlen), in the case of Spain, the ownership distribution is completely different.
@@times4937 Check the latest data, and check eurostat and not the bullshit you were looking.
I am from Poland and I don't really care, whether Eastern Europe catches up with the reset of EU. All I care about is, that my life is becoming better, and I will settle for that.
That is the spirit!
Greece meanwhile has been in the EU decades longer than those countries and.. our economy is still worse than it was in 2008..
Greece is an example of country that does not benefit from the EU membership at all. It's an Orthodox Christian country, it culturally doesn't really belong into the West. Greek people want to have eastern work ethics but western standard of living. Decades of socialism made Greek manufacturing uncompetitive, Greek labour is neither cheap nor highly skilled, country has high debt and overly generous social system. It is the worst example of a country in middle income trap.
I can see there are only two ways in which Greece can go. Cut government spending and lower wages to similar level of your neighbours Romania and Turkey. Or massively invest in high tech sector.
@@jirislavicek9954 Greece goverment is just bad. Honestly all of South of Europe is pretty much shitshow constanly getting worse.
Form the hellenic alliance with turkey stop spending money on defense rather invest that money saved to the other sectors improve your infrastructure, prosper with Turkey and Balkans, if not there is no way coming out of this.
@@jirislavicek9954 greece invented the west you inbrd racst neantertll
The first point being how economic stability is fragile and misleading as all the economic wealth is concentrated in the capital cities and the other regions still being poorer than the rest of the EU
Me as a Brit, where towns and cities are going bankrupt and all the weath everything is London focused: ..... erm that's not normal for a big economy?
Thank you for using central/eastern Europe. I hate "Eastern Europe" because it just means "Poor Europe" or at best "post-soviet". Estonia has nothing to do with Bulgaria, the term is useless.
Czechia, spared the devastation of Hitler's invasion and the subsequent communist era, could be argued to be wealthier than Austria today. The historical disruptions caused by World War II and decades of communist rule stifled economic growth, innovation, and international trade. In contrast, Austria enjoyed more political stability and economic freedom during the same periods, allowing it to prosper. In the absence of these historical setbacks, it is conceivable that Czechia’s natural resources, skilled workforce, and strategic location might have enabled it to surpass Austria in economic development and overall wealth.
Even Hungary was significantly richer than Austria in the 50's. Even if the siege of Budapest was longer than Stalingrad, then we had communism. I have just been to beautiful Czechia, at least you maintained your castles and your heritage. In Hungary it was forbidden because we were supposed to be bad. Anything old and beautiful was left to rot away outside of Budapest. Now we are spending billions to renovate, but it takes time.
The Czech Republic has already overtaken all European countries (in terms of the lives of their citizens) and is now the best country in Europe.
Let me give you a hint. Eastern EU will never be as prosperous as the west. We are talking former empires with vast financial resources. Yes you can read that 100 new factories are opened in Bulgaria, but they are German or Austrian owned. They are here only to pay the bare minimum and collect back every bit of profit. The factories, the machines, the know how is western owned and that's not going to change.
What do you mean they won't be that rich? Which specific citizen are you talking about?? There are a lot of rich people in Eastern Europe who own businesses, beautiful properties, luxury cars etc.
Generally average resident of a large city in Poland , if he sells his apartment in a large city in Poland, will also buy a nice apartment in many places in Western European countries. There is also a very large number of people who develop own businesses which grow .
Clowns in the West often have a false image of Poland because people from smaller towns and poorer regions often go abroad.
I guess it depends. UK is collapsing, Greece and Italy doesn’t do to well. Yeah Germany, Netherlands and France will be always top 3 but they basically run EU they won’t let anyone take their place, rest of the west can be easily replaced by eastern countries.
@@Miki99432 Greece and Italy have had good growth rates recently
Those charts are just smoke and mirrors of what is really happening.
20 years is new?
It is for Western Europeans and Americans. You know... They still love calling us "former soviet" so...
It's just 1 generation & no one has joined since, except Croatia. So, in that sense, they're still the newest members.
Croatia 11 years.
Can l ask where you got the EU painting in the video. Looks amazing!!🤩
My intern made it for me for this video! :)
@@IntoEurope it looks great. If l was you l would look at releasing some cool merch featuring that map. Honestly think about it. You could do posters, hoodies, cups,t-shirts, etc.
the thing is that the concept of recepient and provider only derives from the differences of economic outcome. So if Eastern European countries catch up, the differences will get smaller and therefore the percentage of money flowing to the EU relative to GDP will get smaller. In short: If everyone becomes a provider, nobody is a provider anymore.
Hugo, do I fund arte via my German TV licence fee?
"New" 20 years
actually, it is more like cannibalism. Labor just moves to the East for cheaper labor
as lithuainian i can say our "laser" industy is bullshit
as a Lithuanian i can say you probably know nothing of it.
@@expert69able my brother in christ for the industry to be important it has to make up good amount of industry or country's revenue and economy the so called "laser industry" dose non of it and all the nonsense with taiwan end up back stabbing us so no yeah maybe stop inhaling so much hopium
Lithuanian biotech is much bigger now
@@kestutisa3826 u are ware that laser industry and biotech is 2 different things even name itself say biotech i am talking about lasers last time i check lasers have nothing to do with living organism
Obviously the “new” EU countries have long ago converged with the more poorly managed “old” EU countries. The question of course is where to go from there. While textbook says transition to services, it isn’t quite as simple as this. Finance and tech have a reputation as big money spinners, but gsp per cap adjusted by state price indexes will quickly show you that NY and CA are very much NOT the richest states in the US. I think the lesson is that in the industrialized world, prosperity is as much about cost of living as it is about gross economic output.
It looked good between 2004-2020, but after covid, everything went to shits, our today living standard is like return to 90s, maybe even worse. Even when you have pretty good salary, you have problem to pay rent, electricity and all these things + kindergarten crisis (you will not find any) + school crisis + health care crisis + another like 20 crisises here in Czechia. 😀 It's for sure that populists will win next elections, I am not happy because of that, but it's inevitable when people can't afford to pay school lunches for their kids + EU totally doesn't care about double quality problem we have - western companies (mainly German ones) send worse quality for higher price to us and EU doesn't care.
I know that Germans saved a lot of bankrupting companies after 1989, but now it's time to get rid of them finally, because they are not helping anymore, they are exploiting us, like with electricity, we have to send it to Germany and then we buy it back for 10 times higher price and people are extremely angry and you will see it after next elections.
Sad situation of stagnation in Czechia for the past few years, luckily Poland is still doing good.
Official aid was a big reason. An even bigger one was the redirection of surplus German capital from the Southern periphery to the East. This had major consequences which is often overlooked or not remembered. It was also a contributing factor to the Eurozone crisis in the Southern periphery. The South tended to attract "hot money". The East fixed capital investment.
Check the minimum wage in those countries. It will tell the real story.
In Denmark, Swede, Switzerland, Norway and others there is no minimum wage. Your argument has no economic basis.
@@paullarne You're actually stupid. If anything, the single market meant that smaller countries with a weaker economy had their domestic companies taken over and their population stolen, from a lack of jobs. The UK together with Germany was the biggest beneficiary of this situation. It's just that the British are duller then a circle, hence Brexit.
@@paullarneI mean West European companies gained access to Eastern European markets as well. Don't you think Britain's economic malaise is also tied to a lack of competitiveness and productivity, e.g. compared to Germany, Benelux or the Nordic countries?
Adjust the average (not minimum) wage for purchasing power. That will tell you a more accurate story.
@@paullarne That myth about "stealing jobs" is a nonsense, here in Czechia, we have 500 000 Ukrainians and they don't steal our jobs, they do jobs we don't want to do and they work 12 or even more hours, native Czech would never work like that, would you work like that as a Brit?
Also western companies (especially german ones) are exploiting us since 1990 and they earn a lot of money from that, we have NO profit from that, we are doing well qualified jobs in their factories, but they pay 1/4 of their salaries and if you are a Brit, you are exploiting Inds and other people from your former colonies the same as Germans expoit us.
Also I will give you an example of not honest nazi behavior of western european companies - some material is twice more expensive than 2 years ago, but when you want to increase price of products by 5%, Germans are angry and threaten that they will stop cooperating with us and we will earn nothing, while German companies like Lidl increase prices of food 10 times every years, some products are 3 times more expensive than few years ago and we have to tolerate this nazi behavior.
So when you think we undercut you and profit from that, then think again.
Ireland didn't become euroskeptic after becoming rich.
Just forget to think in countrys and see Europa as one!
no
Hell no.
Благополучие страны я считаю в том что она может без внешних вливаний за счёт своего бюджета содержать и развивать инфраструктуру и прочие вещи. Большинство стран Евросоюза сидит на подачках Брюсселя.
Interesting video but why are you still using "Czech Republic" (a rather outdated term in informal speech) when "Czechia" is the official short name in English? Even the EU website and the UN use Czechia exclusively. Not to mention all sports competitions, like hockey and the Olympics. Heck, even the Eurovision Song Contest uses Czechia since last year.
Nobody is forcing you to use short name, you can also say "United States of America" if you want instead of USA.
@@Pidalin It is the official short form and has been registered and underlined as the preferred mode of use when referring to the country. And while indeed you could use the official longform name, he hadn't done so for any other country, which makes the choice to do so here haphazard and odd.
@examplenameyoutube that is not true, for the simple fact that even "Czech Republic" causes some people to think it be the "Chechen Republic", I.e. Chechnya. I can think of a few infamous examples, especially that CNN news report about the attack on the Boston Marathon, when that mistake was made regardless, and the reporter used the "republic" form. Those who do not want to use "Czechia" justify it after the fact anyway they want, not for some actual deeply held legibiliy reasons. Bohemia is an exonym that refered to an entirely different group if people that used to inhabit the land before Czechs migrated to it in the 6th century, and today still would only refer to part of the country, angerinfmg those who live in Silesia and Morava. It is the same annoyance as referring to the Netherlands as "Holland", it also makes the people of Utrecht or Limburg peeved.
I have no clue why did you change your country name and what for...Do not be so oversensitive. Chechia sounds like "Chechenya" and I guess it is not what you want to be mixed with.
Czech Republic is still perfectly correct name of the country. Personally, I like it better (many of my fellow countrymen find "Czechia" to sound weird... Even "Česko" in Czech sounds a bit odd.) It's not in any way outdated.
Eastern Europe may grow a little bit more but then will join the rest of the EU in its long term decline.
Unless we separate and go our own way
What is omitted in such comparisons of Central and Western Europe is the wealth that Western Europe has already accumulated.
Yes, Croatia is doing great under HDZ although it has been a member of the EU for only 10 years, not 20 like the Eastern European countries. For years in a row it has among the highest GDP growth in the Europe, among the highest growth in industrial production, while the infrastructure is constantly being built (seaports, highways, bridges, tunnels, etc.). The problem is the radical Left in the country, which constantly hinders Croatia wherever it goes, where most of all they hate the success of Croats and Croatia. 😄
the only thing HDZ did in the past 20 years is steal and destroy.
croatia used to have factories, shipbuilding used to be a thing now it is just tourism
our judicary used to be independent but this year HDZ took it over.
Croatia used to be more developed than czech republic,poland,hungary and slovakia yet now it is barely richer than bulgaria.
it is not even about the left-right divide HDZ does not have an ideology other than stealing, if you continue voting for HDZ even bulgaria will become richer than croatia not to mention there wont be a croatia in the future judging by the amount of people leaving the country.
Oh you are obviously big HDZ lover. And very biased too.
Never voted in my life. I leave that to people of limited intellectual capacity.
Some mentioned countries are Northern European, not Eastern or Central European.
Crying balt
High energy priices - mainly thanks to damn EU
What are you talking about? We had very LOW energy prices, until the maniac in Kremlin attacked Ukraine. How much do you think other countries pay for energies? People didn't even bother to insulate houses, because the gas was so cheap...
@@vaclavkrpec2879 3/4 th of energy price is from taxes. Like Co2 tax.
@@krzysztofsaa2997 Do you pay a CO2 tax? I doubt it. And for high CO2 emitters, I think it's a good thing.
@@vaclavkrpec2879 Of course you do pay CO2 tax in your energy bill. How do you think it works? And the way EU counts cost of energy also makes it as expensive as possible.
Not being invaded by Russia - mainly thanks to damn NATO
The capital of Bulgaria is located on the left of the map not right