Reuters points out that owning a single share of Eurodisney, the long time ill-fated European branch of Disney, may have been one of the best investments in recent European economic history. Shareholders attending last Thursday’s annual meeting were rewarded with two tickets, a Lion-King toy, and a restaurant voucher. Just the tickets, currently priced at ? 98, represent a yield of about 21800 % for a single share, which was priced at ? 0.45 on the same day.
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Europe and the War on Liberty – Maria Farrell on the proposals for European anti-terror legislation after Madrid
Siemens Follow-up
Just a quick follow up to my recent post on German outsourcing. I fear the issue rather got lost in an interesting, if secondary, topic in the comments section. One reader was, however kind enought to draw this article to my attention.
The German firm Siemens will move most of the 15,000 software programming jobs from its offices in the United States and Western Europe to India, China and Eastern Europe, a company official said Monday.
“Siemens has recognized that a huge amount of software development activity needs to be moved from high-cost countries to low-cost countries,” said Anil R. Laud, managing director of Siemens Information Systems, the group’s information technology subsidiary in India.
Source: SignonSanDiego.Com
Now this dates from mid February so it would appear that there was fire to the smoke, even if it may have expediently been extinguished. I repeat: this reality is inevitably going to arrive on our doorstep and we would do better have some more informed public discussion over some of the implications. In this regard I would again draw attention to one comment of Jean-Claude Trichet in the interview I cited yesterday.
there is the unfortunate phenomenon that public opinion very often discovers the problems at the moment they are tackled, when governments, parliaments and social partners carry out the structural reforms that are urgently needed. This late and brutal discovery could have a negative impact on confidence. Had the public been more aware of the underlying problems, the reforms, when decided upon and implemented, would have increased confidence. That is the reason why we believe that transparency, pedagogy and tireless explanations are an essential part of preparing structural reforms.
We have only recently seen in the Spanish context one way a public which felt it may have been kept systematically misinformed by its government can react. We would do well to learn from this. Globalisation is here, it is more potent than ever, and it won’t simply go away just because we choose to ignore it. I may have cause to disagree with Trichet about precisely which structural reforms I would like to see assertively advanced, but the point he is making is absolutely valid. Be warned.
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Europe Counts – a European Parliament site trying to encourage voters to take part in June’s Parliament elections (found via Doctor Vee)
Economic Consequences of Spain’s 11M
Italian consumer confidence has remained near a 10-year low in March in the wake of the Madrid terrorist bombings. In fact the bombings may have hurt sentiment in Italy more than the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. according to a statement from the government-funded Isae institute. The confidence survey, which was carried out between March 1 and March 12, showed that consumers who had been growing more optimistic about the prospects for lower inflation and improvements in unemployment turned pessimistic in the two days after the bombings. In fact while the 22-year-old Italian consumer confidence index touched its all time record low of 93.7 in April 1993, March was the third month in a row that the index has been below 102, the last time it was that low being in February 1994.
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Outsourcing Debate Hits Germany
Well, well, this was hardly unexpected. In fact the reality may well be that this time there is plenty of smoke but no fire, since Siemens has announced it has no concrete plans to move 10,000 jobs abroad. Indeed much of the noise at present may emanate from a threat to move as a negotiating posture in order to try and force changes. But behind this the underlying reality is that the problem is coming. Not only is Germany having a ‘job-loss’ recovery there is good reason to doubt whether it is having a recovery at all. And of course the main course may well be yet to be served since many of the jobs threatening to relocate seem to be in the industrial sector, whilst just round the corner the high-end services issue is surely coming. Still there is one difference with the US: the headlines are not being made by an opposition candidate talking about Benedict Arnold CEO’s, but by a Chamber of Commerce head who seems to be saying he’s Benedict Arnold and proud of it.
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Our deaf, schizophrenic uncle S.
William Pfaff, a writer who wrote about European-American relations and the challenges of perceived unchallenged US global leadership well before the Iraq induced and war-blogged “transatlantic rift”, may have indeed listened to Carly Simon when he wrote his not too favorable review of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s election year foreign policy summary “The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership” for the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.
Carly Simon’s said it all before
Daniel Davies has the last word on Spanish “appeasement” of terrorists.
Regional Elections in France: The UMP takes a hit
Yesterday was regional elections day in France. France has not traditionally had any strong local government structure – one of the first acts of the revolution was the abolition of the old provinces and their replacement with purely administrative “departments.” However, the last 20 years have seen radical changes in the way French government is structured and the EU in particular has been a big force in decentralising the French state. The creation of the regions in 1982 was motivated by a desire to create institutions able to participate in partnering programmes with German Länder, particularly programmes subsidised by the EU. However, they have since taken on a life of their own. France is a quite diverse country on the ground and it has a number of long-standing problems related to regional differences.
So, although the regions are still not very powerful in comparison to the central state, they have been growing in power, particularly in areas that are culturally or economically outside of the core of the French state – Corsica, Alsace, Brittany and the overseas territories in particular. A number of significant powers over regional economic development and education are shared with the regions.
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