V skratke:
"In the field of economy, countries have mishandled many things in the past 20 years" that followed after the fall of the Berlin wall, says professor Michael Landesmann, who spoke on the conference "Two decades after" organized by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
Profesor from the Institute of International Economic Relations in Viena Michael Landesmann talked about East-West "EUnification", that guided the process of the transformation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
According to him, this transition took place in an historically rather unprecedented way, in terms of the speed by which the liberalization occurred.
He doubts that the growth model that we have here from the mid 90. with all the interruptions that characterized the region, is going to persist in that form.
Professor identifies economic vulnerabilities of the region. He argues, that due to the to the very strong market integration and due to the very strong openness, some very striking structural imbalances have emerged. Some countries have very strong imbalances, but some avoided it altogether and in fact have performed very well. There were also some direct mistakes made in terms of traditional macroeconomic policies and also fiscal policies.
After the accession to the EU, the new member states grew faster and as a result also the EU of 27 grew at slightly faster rate than the EU 15. Of course, the economic weight of CEE countries (or new member states) is still only about 15 % of the West European states. Still, the region face very striking regional inequalities.
Visegrad countries have experienced dramatic changes in trade, for some countries it was a real success story. The assumption about the traditional division of labour in production specialization did not materialized and we did see a very dramatic proceses of changes and upgrading the structure of production in these countries.
Prof. Landesmann talks about the paradox between the growth rates in output in these countries and the absent growth in jobs as well as about other structural labour market adjustments. The burden of strategic adjustment was really on the people with low education level, he claims.
"Certain groups of countries are very heavily affected by the economic crisis. Countries that were not initially hit but in the long run, the repercussions might be stronger than for others. The world is different."