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New Europe or India.

 
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Hi all,
Now that the EU is growing by adding counties that, how can I put it, have cheaper living costs and lower salaries. In the long run and with the help the EU provides these new counties are hopefully going to become more stable.
I see software warehouses starting (well thinking about) moving into these counties, with the aim of lowering costs and ultimately being able to compete on cost with our friends in India. Any thoughts on this?
Chris
 
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Originally posted by Chris Harris:

I see software warehouses starting (well thinking about) moving into these counties, with the aim of lowering costs and ultimately being able to compete on cost with our friends in India. Any thoughts on this?
Chris


I can think of a number of issues here: one of them is the language barrier � East European till date do not have enough English speaking people as in India. Also then there is the basic issue, that is that none of the East EU countries are actually that cheaper than India. Also with relatively limited labor pool and less qualified people, I don�t think they can provide as much as India does today, IMHO.
However they are otherwise very good at various branches of Science, like how good Bulgarians are at Maths etc, and many manufacturing plants producing for European markets are already moving to countries like Romania attracted by the cheaper and hardworking labor pool there.
 
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From what I've seen, there are some East European countries that can actually undercut India when it comes to salaries.
The language problem is the more serious one, though German is popular in many of them, I believe that French is (was?) popular in Poland, and sooner or later it seems everyone Internet connected tries out English.
I've "read" a few program listings with comments in Italian, long before offshoring (just international users). It's generally going to be easier to create a program with a Western look-and-feel and get someone to translate messages and dialogs than it seems to be for many Oriental ones.
Although I personally am amazed that German and English are so closely related considering the radical differences in idioms and sentence structures.
 
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The problems are going to be severe for the western countries in the EU.
An estimated 170.000 people a year from the new members will flood our jobmarkets, undercutting the natives and leading to massive unemployment and those are only the official (read, sanitised to make it look less bad than it is) numbers, the real numbers are likely to be closer to a quarter million a year.
In the beginning these will likely be jobs in lower paid jobs like farmworkers, construction workers and factory workers, but as their economy gets jumpstarted by our money (or what will be left of it in a few years) their educational systems will be able to modernise and train a flood of IT and other tech people too...
Already countries are starting to place strict caps on the numbers of work permits allowed to the new countries in order to prevent their entire workforce from being out of a job in 5 years or less.
 
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Originally posted by Tim Holloway:
From what I've seen, there are some East European countries that can actually undercut India when it comes to salaries.
The language problem is the more serious one, though German is popular in many of them, I believe that French is (was?) popular in Poland, and sooner or later it seems everyone Internet connected tries out English.


Well, there are 80 million Germans and a fair few Swiss and Austrian German speakers. Countries such as Czech republic, Slovakia and Poland will probably have a lot of German speakers, and international companies have already started setting up German speaking call centers in those countries.
 
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Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:
The problems are going to be severe for the western countries in the EU.
An estimated 170.000 people a year from the new members will flood our jobmarkets, undercutting the natives and leading to massive unemployment and those are only the official (read, sanitised to make it look less bad than it is) numbers, the real numbers are likely to be closer to a quarter million a year.
In the beginning these will likely be jobs in lower paid jobs like farmworkers, construction workers and factory workers, but as their economy gets jumpstarted by our money (or what will be left of it in a few years) their educational systems will be able to modernise and train a flood of IT and other tech people too...
Already countries are starting to place strict caps on the numbers of work permits allowed to the new countries in order to prevent their entire workforce from being out of a job in 5 years or less.


I'm not quite so pessimistic ( although I'm in the UK not right next door to them ). For a start, immigrants tend to do the jobs noone else will, or can afford to do. You rightly point out that investment will boost their economies. But isn't that more likely to make them stay where they are? Although they will earn more here ( or Paris, or Berlin ) the costs of living are high, and a large proportion of potential immigrants will get a better standard of living in their home countries. Also, legal immigrants pay taxes and contribute to the local economy. Offshored jobs contribute to someone elses economy.
Personally, as an English speaker, I think my job is far more likely to be threatened by someone in Bangalore than Budapest.
As far as the caps are concerned, I think theres a bit of EU legislation that says that if someone is entitled to work in your country they're entitled to claim state benefits. Many countries are rightly worried that this will lead to 'benefit tourists' who have no interest in working but just want to claim benefits.
 
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You are basically wrong alltogether. I live all my life in Eastern Europe and we are going to join EU in 1st of May this year. Most part of young people (I would say 16...35) speak English and English is very popular here. Salaries much much higher than Indian, eg. I work as Java developer and get approx 1200 euros net per month. We also have highly developed infrastructure.
 
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Actually there is allready lots of outsourcing to Bulgaria, Chechia, Romania, Hungaria taking place. Though I've heard of one project where they now think it would have been much more eficient to stick with those austrians they worked with first.
There is also lots of especially polish black labour in Germany. I lived weeks in a cheap-but-clean hotel, where polnish was by far first language and I don't believe that all those people worked legally here, though I don't know.
With the exception of Poland (40 mio) and Romania (22 Mio) they are all quite small countries. I was suprised not so far ago. I thought they would have more inhabitants:
Chechia: 10 Mio
Hungaria: 10 Mio
Bulgaria: 8 Mio
Slovakia: 5.3 Mio
Slovenia: 2 Mio
Estonia: 1.4 Mio
and to the east:
Belarus: 10.3 Mio
Ukrania: 50 Mio
and now the big one:
Russia: 147 Mio

On the other hand during their catching-up process they will offer some market for our industries.
And although they have fairly good growth rates in last 3 years (have figures at hand:
Chechia: 2.5 %
Poland 1.9%
Hungaria 3.3 %
Slovakia 3,9% (had big problems in the years before).
Estonia 1.5%
UK: 1.9%
France: 1.2%
Germany: 0.4%
Ireland: 5.0%
Spain: 2.4%
Axel
 
Jeroen Wenting
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Originally posted by Axel Janssen:

With the exception of Poland (40 mio) and Romania (22 Mio) they are all quite small countries. I was suprised not so far ago. I thought they would have more inhabitants:
Chechia: 10 Mio
Hungaria: 10 Mio
Bulgaria: 8 Mio
Slovakia: 5.3 Mio
Slovenia: 2 Mio
Estonia: 1.4 Mio


That's roughly the same size as countries like Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and I think Ireland.
Say 10% of the people from these new countries move to those countries (and those 10% will all be of working age), that would almost double the number of people competing for jobs there...
 
Axel Janssen
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... especially because they'll come in companion with 8 Mio germans. Hey. If we go on like this...
... you'll better start some new polder area projects soon. *

* the Netherlands has great tradition of stealing land from sea with dikes (those areas are called polders).
 
Jeroen Wenting
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we should indeed...
There's an area already available, only the water needs to be pumped out.
Now to kill all the greens so we can get the project approved without sabotage (but if we do that, we get rid of enough people that there's no need for new land )
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