Page 45 - BNE_magazine_12_2019 dec19

bne December 2019 30 Years of transition I 45
number of tech jobs as a share of total employment is overwhelmingly higher in West European EU members (plus Estonia). Again, it is both Central
and Southern EU members that are
at the lower end of the spectrum: “ICT specialists accounted for 2.8 % of the total workforce in Italy followed by Lithuania and Cyprus with 2.7 %, 2.4 % in Portugal, 2.2 % in Romania, 1.8 %, in Greece
and 1.7 % in Latvia,” Eurostat said.
One area where the CEE countries
do perform well is in gender equality
in the tech sector – a legacy from the communist era. Bulgaria had the highest proportion of women among the ICT workforce, 28.3%, followed by Lithuania and Romania. Notably, in some
Central European countries including Bulgaria the share of women in the tech workforce fell between 2008 and 2018.
The shift to a low-carbon economy
As the global climate crisis threatens
to snowball into a climate catastrophe, the pressure is on to convert to a low carbon economy – and for the most part the eastern EU members have further to go than their western peers. While the picture isn’t altogether clear cut, data from Eurostat on the share of energy derived from renewable sources puts the Visegrad 4 countries plus Bulgaria close to the bottom of the list.
Only Romania, which has abundant hydropower capacity, is close to the top; the increase in Romania between 2004 and 2017 indicates that the generous (now largely scrapped) incentives for wind and solar power also played a role. Poland in particular has indicated it will struggle to meet the EU’s renewable energy targets, due to its huge coal industry this shift will be politically very difficult.
The other side of the consumption
coin is household waste. East Euro- pean countries still produce much less municipal waste per capita than in Western Europe. In fact, all of the CEE countries produce less than the EU average of 486kg per capita a year, with the highest level of waste in the region being produced in Slovenia (471kg).
In Romania the figure is just 272kg.
This is a sign that despite recent con- sumption boom, CEE people are just not consuming so much, or possibly buying less packaged goods, for example Roma- nia still has a large rural population and a high level of subsistence farming.
“For 2017, municipal waste generation totals vary considerably, ranging from 272 kg per capita in Romania to 781 kg per capita in Denmark. The variations reflect differences in consumption patterns and economic wealth, but
also depend on how municipal waste
is collected and managed. There are differences between countries regarding the degree to which waste from commerce, trade and administration
the picture. The other side – as high- lighted by European Bank for Recon- struction and Development (EBRD) chief economist Beata Javorcik in an interview with bne IntelliNews for this series – is governance and the quality of the region’s institutions.
In the interview, Javorcik pointed
out that the gap between transition countries and advanced economies remains quite large when it comes to institutions such as control of corruption, rule of law, quality of regulation and effectiveness of governments, and improvement in these areas has stalled. “If half of the governance gap with
the G7 countries was closed, income
“As the global climate crisis threatens to snowball into a climate catastrophe, the pressure is on to convert to a low carbon economy”
is collected and managed together with waste from households," said Eurostat in a note on the data.
While CEE countries are producing less waste, along with Southern EU members they are also less likely
to be relying what they do produce
– with some outliers. According to 2017 Eurostat data, Germany was
the best performer, with 67.6% of its waste recycled, followed by Slovenia (57.8%) and Lithuania (48.1%). The lowest recycling rates were in Malta (6.4), Romania (13.9), Cyprus (16.1), Greece (18.9) and Latvia (23.3).
The environment has also come out
as one of the important mobilising forces for Central Europe citizens, from the election of former lawyer and environmental campaigner Zuzana Caputova – dubbed “Slovakia’s Erin Brockovich” – as president of Slova- kia, to the thousands-strong protests in Romania over the Rosia Montana gold mine and illegal logging.
The governance question
And such action is important, as the economic data only shows part of
convergence would be brought forward by almost a generation,” she said.
This gap is illustrated by studies such as Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The index ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, according
to experts and businesspeople.
This gives a somewhat similar picture
to the economic data, as the highest perceptions of corruption are in the east and south of the EU, while the lowest are in the northwestern corner of the continent (Denmark was in first place in the 2018 CPI). Yet Poland and the Czech Republic now perform better than Spain and Italy, while Greece is the lowest ranked EU country except for Bulgaria.
Similarly, three Nordic countries top Freedom House’s latest Freedom
in the World ranking, and while all the EU nations except Hungary are rated “free”, by and large the West European countries still outperform the eastern EU members.
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