Cyclopedia Of Economics

Macedonia

The nascent private sector is nowhere to be found in the list of projects the EBRD so sagely chose to falter into here. The Electricity and Telecoms monopolies are prime beneficiaries as is the airport. The EBRD is also a passive shareholder in both big universal banks - until recently, conduits of state mismanagement. The SME and Trade Facilitation credit lines were conveniently divvied up among five domestic banks (one went belly up, the managers of two are under criminal investigation and one was sold to a Greek state bank). Despite vigorous protestations to the contrary, none of this money reached its proclaimed entrepreneurial targets. Two loans were made to giant local firms - the natural preserve of commercial lenders and equity investors the world over. The EBRD contributed nothing to the emergence of a management culture, to the development of proper corporate governance, to the safeguarding of property rights and the protection of minority shareholders here. Instead, it colluded in the perpetuation of monopolies, shoddy and shady banking practices, the pertinacious robbery titled "privatization" and the pretence of funding languishing private sector enterprises.

Russia

Its 2 billion US dollars portfolio all but wiped out in the August 1998 financial crisis, the EBRD has now returned with 700 million new Euros to be - conservatively but not more safely - lent in major energy and telecom behemoths.

The historic, pre-1998, portfolio appears impressive. Almost 11 billion US dollars were generated by the EBRD's less than 4. The bottom line reads 94 projects. Yet, when one neutralizes the infrastructural ones (including the gas and energy sector) - one is left with less than 50% of the amount. Add "infrastructure-like" projects (water transportation and the like) - and less than 30% of the portfolio went to what can be called proper "private sector". Moreover, even these investments and credits were geared towards traditional and smokestack industries: mining, food processing, pipelines, rubber and such. Not an entrepreneur in sight. And the EBRD's meagre loan-loss provisions and reserves cast serious doubts regarding the mental state of both its directors and its auditors.

To varying degrees, these two countries are typical. Development banks, like industrial policy, import substitution and poverty reduction, have gone in and out of multilateral fashion several times in the last few decades. But there is a consensus regarding some minimum aims of such bureaucracy-laden establishments - and the EBRD achieves none. It does not encourage entrepreneurship. It does not improve corporate governance. It does not enhance property rights. It does not allocate economic resources efficiently. It competes directly with other - more desirable - financing alternatives. It is not equipped to monitor its vast and inert portfolio. By implication it collaborates in graft, tax evasion and worse. It is a waste of scarce resources badly needed elsewhere. It should be administered a coup de grace. And its marbled abode - so out of touch with the realities of its clients and its balance sheet - should be sold to someone more up to the task. A bank, for instance.

POST SCRIPTUM - Comments Made to "The Banker" - February 2002

I would not have written the same article today. The EBRD used to be pretty monolithic in its four orientations: pro-state companies, pro-big business (or mega projects), pro-governmental projects, and pro-commodities (mostly energy products).

It is now more open to SME financing - and not only as lip service.

Instead of colluding with venal, inefficient, crony-ridden, and decrepit local banking systems - it has taken over them in partnership with foreign investors. It has a more tangible in-field operating presence.

Its assets are more balanced (in maturity structures, single lender exposures, collateral portfolios, etc.). It is more innovative and creative in its collaboration with the private sector, offering a varied range of vehicles. In short: it is becoming more community orientated and less "commercially" conservative. It begins to fulfill its original charter of filling the gap between IFI's and micro-lending. It is still hobbled by overweening political interventionism - but that is to be expected in a regional development bank (see the ADB, IADB, and so on).

E-Commerce

The recent bloodbath among online content peddlers and digital media proselytisers can be traced to two deadly sins. The first was to assume that traffic equals sales. In other words, that a miraculous conversion will spontaneously occur among the hordes of visitors to a web site. It was taken as an article of faith that a certain percentage of this mass will inevitably and nigh hypnotically reach for their bulging pocketbooks and purchase content, however packaged. Moreover, ad revenues (more reasonably) were assumed to be closely correlated with "eyeballs". This myth led to an obsession with counters, page hits, impressions, unique visitors, statistics and demographics.

It failed, however, to take into account the dwindling efficacy of what Seth Godin, in his brilliant essay ("Unleashing the IdeaVirus"), calls "Interruption Marketing" - ads, banners, spam and fliers. It also ignored, at its peril, the ethos of free content and open source prevalent among the Internet opinion leaders, movers and shapers. These two neglected aspects of Internet hype and culture led to the trouncing of erstwhile promising web media companies while their business models were exposed as wishful thinking.

The second mistake was to exclusively cater to the needs of a highly idiosyncratic group of people (Silicone Valley geeks and nerds). The assumption that the USA (let alone the rest of the world) is Silicone Valley writ large proved to be calamitous to the industry.

In the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins and Rupert Sheldrake developed models of cultural evolution. Dawkins' "meme" is a cultural element (like a behaviour or an idea) passed from one individual to another and from one generation to another not through biological -genetic means - but by imitation. Sheldrake added the notion of contagion - "morphic resonance" - which causes behaviour patterns to suddenly emerged in whole populations. Physicists talked about sudden "phase transitions", the emergent results of a critical mass reached. A latter day thinker, Michael Gladwell, called it the "tipping point".

Seth Godin invented the concept of an "ideavirus" and an attendant marketing terminology. In a nutshell, he says, to use his own summation:

"Marketing by interrupting people isn't cost-effective anymore. You can't afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing, in large groups and hope that some will send you money. Instead the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk."

This is sound advice with a shaky conclusion. The conversion from exposure to a marketing message (even from peers within a consumer network) - to an actual sale is a convoluted, multi-layered, highly complex process. It is not a "black box", better left unattended to. It is the same deadly sin all over again - the belief in a miraculous conversion. And it is highly US-centric. People in other parts of the world interact entirely differently.

You can get them to visit and you get them to talk and you can get them to excite others. But to get them to buy - is a whole different ballgame. Dot.coms had better begin to study its rules.

Economics, Behavioral Aspects of

"It is impossible to describe any human action if one does not refer to the meaning the actor sees in the stimulus as well as in the end his response is aiming at."

Ludwig von Mises

Economics - to the great dismay of economists - is merely a branch of psychology. It deals with individual behaviour and with mass behaviour. Many of its practitioners sought to disguise its nature as a social science by applying complex mathematics where common sense and direct experimentation would have yielded far better results.

The outcome has been an embarrassing divorce between economic theory and its subjects.

The economic actor is assumed to be constantly engaged in the rational pursuit of self interest. This is not a realistic model - merely a useful approximation. According to this latter day - rational - version of the dismal science, people refrain from repeating their mistakes systematically. They seek to optimize their preferences. Altruism can be such a preference, as well.

Still, many people are non-rational or only nearly rational in certain situations. And the definition of "self-interest" as the pursuit of the fulfillment of preferences is a tautology.

The theory fails to predict important phenomena such as "strong reciprocity" - the propensity to "irrationally" sacrifice resources to reward forthcoming collaborators and punish free-riders. It even fails to account for simpler forms of apparent selflessness, such as reciprocal altruism (motivated by hopes of reciprocal benevolent treatment in the future).

Even the authoritative and mainstream 1995 "Handbook of Experimental Economics", by John Hagel and Alvin Roth (eds.) admits that people do not behave in accordance with the predictions of basic economic theories, such as the standard theory of utility and the theory of general equilibrium. Irritatingly for economists, people change their preferences mysteriously and irrationally. This is called  "preference reversals".

Moreover, people's preferences, as evidenced by their choices and decisions in carefully controlled experiments, are inconsistent. They tend to lose control of their actions or procrastinate because they place greater importance (i.e., greater "weight") on the present and the near future than on the far future. This makes most people both irrational and unpredictable.

Either one cannot design an experiment to rigorously and validly test theorems and conjectures in economics - or something is very flawed with the intellectual pillars and models of this field.

Neo-classical economics has failed on several fronts simultaneously. This multiple failure led to despair and the re-examination of basic precepts and tenets.

Consider this sample of outstanding issues:

Unlike other economic actors and agents, governments are accorded a special status and receive special treatment in economic theory. Government is alternately cast as a saint, seeking to selflessly maximize social welfare - or as the villain, seeking to perpetuate and increase its power ruthlessly, as per public choice theories.

Both views are caricatures of reality. Governments indeed seek to perpetuate their clout and increase it - but they do so mostly in order to redistribute income and rarely for self-enrichment.

Economics also failed until recently to account for the role of innovation in growth and development. The discipline often ignored the specific nature of knowledge industries (where returns increase rather than diminish and network effects prevail). Thus, current economic thinking is woefully inadequate to deal with information monopolies (such as Microsoft), path dependence, and pervasive externalities.

Classic cost/benefit analyses fail to tackle very long term investment horizons (i.e., periods). Their underlying assumption - the opportunity cost of delayed consumption - fails when applied beyond the investor's useful economic life expectancy. People care less about their grandchildren's future than about their own. This is because predictions concerned with the far future are highly uncertain and investors refuse to base current decisions on fuzzy "what ifs".

This is a problem because many current investments, such as the fight against global warming, are likely to yield results only decades hence. There is no effective method of cost/benefit analysis applicable to such time horizons.

How are consumer choices influenced by advertising and by pricing? No one seems to have a clear answer. Advertising is concerned with the dissemination of information. Yet it is also a signal sent to consumers that a certain product is useful and qualitative and that the advertiser's stability, longevity, and profitability are secure. Advertising communicates a long term commitment to a winning product by a firm with deep pockets. This is why patrons react to the level of visual exposure to advertising - regardless of its content.

Humans may be too multi-dimensional and hyper-complex to be usefully captured by econometric models. These either lack predictive powers or lapse into logical fallacies, such as the "omitted variable bias" or "reverse causality". The former is concerned with important variables unaccounted for - the latter with reciprocal causation, when every cause is also caused by its own effect.

These are symptoms of an all-pervasive malaise. Economists are simply not sure what precisely constitutes their subject matter. Is economics about the construction and testing of models in accordance with certain basic assumptions? Or should it revolve around the mining of data for emerging patterns, rules, and "laws"?

On the one hand, patterns based on limited - or, worse, non-recurrent - sets of data form a questionable foundation for any kind of "science". On the other hand, models based on assumptions are also in doubt because they are bound to be replaced by new models with new, hopefully improved, assumptions.

One way around this apparent quagmire is to put human cognition (i.e., psychology) at the heart of economics. Assuming that being human is an immutable and knowable constant - it should be amenable to scientific treatment. "Prospect theory", "bounded rationality theories", and the study of "hindsight bias" as well as other cognitive deficiencies are the outcomes of this approach.

To qualify as science, economic theory must satisfy the following cumulative conditions:

1. 
   All-inclusiveness (anamnetic) – It must encompass, integrate, and incorporate all the facts known about economic behaviour.
   

2. 
   Coherence – It must be chronological, structured and causal. It must explain, for instance, why a certain economic policy leads to specific economic outcomes - and why.
   

3. 
   Consistency – It must be self-consistent. Its sub-"units" cannot contradict one another or go against the grain of the main "theory". It must also be consistent with the observed phenomena, both those related to economics and those pertaining to non-economic human behaviour. It must adequately cope with irrationality and cognitive deficits.
   

4. 
   Logical compatibility – It must not violate the laws of its internal logic and the rules of logic "out there", in the real world.
   

5. 
   Insightfulness – It must cast the familiar in a new light, mine patterns and rules from big bodies of data ("data mining"). Its insights must be the inevitable conclusion of the logic, the language, and the evolution of the theory.
   

6. 
   Aesthetic – Economic theory must be both plausible and "right", beautiful (aesthetic), not cumbersome, not awkward, not discontinuous, smooth, and so on.
   

7. 
   Parsimony – The theory must employ a minimum number of assumptions and entities to explain the maximum number of observed economic behaviours.
   

8. 
   Explanatory Powers – It must explain the behaviour of economic actors, their decisions, and why economic events develop the way they do.
   

9. 
   Predictive (prognostic) Powers – Economic theory must be able to predict future economic events and trends as well as the future behaviour of economic actors.
   

10. 
    Prescriptive Powers – The theory must yield policy prescriptions, much like physics yields technology. Economists must develop "economic technology" - a set of tools, blueprints, rules of thumb, and mechanisms with the power to change the " economic world".
    

11. 
    Imposing – It must be regarded by society as the preferable and guiding organizing principle in the economic sphere of human behaviour.
    

12. 
    Elasticity – Economic theory must possess the intrinsic abilities to self organize, reorganize, give room to emerging order, accommodate new data comfortably, and avoid rigid reactions to attacks from within and from without.
    

Many current economic theories do not meet these cumulative criteria and are, thus, merely glorified narratives.

But meeting the above conditions is not enough. Scientific theories must also pass the crucial hurdles of testability, verifiability, refutability, falsifiability, and repeatability. Yet, many economists go as far as to argue that no experiments can be designed to test the statements of economic theories.

It is difficult - perhaps impossible - to test hypotheses in economics for four reasons.

1. 
   Ethical – Experiments would have to involve human subjects, ignorant of the reasons for the experiments and their aims. Sometimes even the very existence of an experiment will have to remain a secret (as with double blind experiments). Some experiments may involve unpleasant experiences. This is ethically unacceptable.
   

2. 
   Design Problems - The design of experiments in economics is awkward and difficult. Mistakes are often inevitable, however careful and meticulous the designer of the experiment is.
   

3. 
   The Psychological Uncertainty Principle – The current mental state of a human subject can be (theoretically) fully known. But the passage of time and, sometimes, the experiment itself, influence the subject and alter his or her mental state - a problem known in economic literature as "time inconsistencies". The very processes of measurement and observation influence the subject and change it.
   

4. 
   Uniqueness – Experiments in economics, therefore, tend to be unique. They cannot be repeated even when the SAME subjects are involved, simply because no human subject remains the same for long. Repeating the experiments with other subjects casts in doubt the scientific value of the results.
   

5. 
   The undergeneration of testable hypotheses – Economic theories do not generate a sufficient number of hypotheses, which can be subjected to scientific testing. This has to do with the fabulous (i.e., storytelling) nature of the discipline.
   

In a way, economics has an affinity with some private languages. It is a form of art and, as such, it is self-sufficient and self-contained. If certain structural, internal constraints and requirements are met – a statement in economics is deemed to be true even if it does not satisfy external (scientific) requirements. Thus, the standard theory of utility is considered valid in economics despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary - simply because it is aesthetic and mathematically convenient.

So, what are economic "theories" good for?

Economic "theories" and narratives offer an organizing principle, a sense of order, predictability, and justice. They postulate  an inexorable drive toward greater welfare and utility (i.e., the idea of progress). They render our chaotic world meaningful and make us feel part of a larger whole. Economics strives to answer the "why’s" and "how’s" of our daily life. It is dialogic and prescriptive (i.e., provides behavioural prescriptions). In certain ways, it is akin to religion.

In its catechism, the believer (let's say, a politician) asks: "Why... (and here follows an economic problem or behaviour)".

The economist answers:

"The situation is like this not because the world is whimsically cruel, irrational, and arbitrary - but because ... (and here follows a causal explanation based on an economic model). If you were to do this or that the situation is bound to improve".

The believer feels reassured by this explanation and by the explicit affirmation that there is hope providing he follows the prescriptions. His belief in the existence of linear order and justice administered by some supreme, transcendental principle is restored.

This sense of "law and order" is further enhanced when the theory yields predictions which come true, either because they are self-fulfilling or because some real "law", or pattern, has emerged. Alas, this happens rarely. As "The Economist" notes gloomily, economists have the most disheartening record of failed predictions - and prescriptions.

Economies, Classification of

The national economies of the world can be divided to the scavenger and the predator types. The former are parasitic economies which feed off the latter. The relationship is often not that of symbiosis, where two parties maintain a mutually beneficial co-existence. Here, one economy feeds off others in a way, which is harmful, even detrimental to the hosts. But this interaction - however undesirable - is the region's only hope.

The typology of scavenger economies reveals their sources of sustenance:

Conjunctural - These economies feed off historical or economic conjunctures or crises. They position themselves as a bridge between warring or conflicting parties. Switzerland rendered this service to Nazi Germany (1933-1945), Macedonia and Greece to Serbia (1992 to the present), Cyprus aided and abetted Russia (1987 to the present), Jordan for Iraq (1991 to the present), and now, Montenegro acts the part for both Serbia and Kosovo. These economies consist of smuggling, siege breaking, contraband, arms trade and illegal immigration. They benefit economically by violating both international and domestic laws and by providing international outcasts and rogues with alternative routes of supply, and with goods and services.

Criminal - These economies are infiltrated by criminal gangs or suffused with criminal behaviour. Such infiltration is two phased: the properly criminal phase and the money laundering one. In the first phase, criminal activities yield income and result in wealth accumulation. In the second one, the money thus generated is laundered and legitimized. It is invested in legal, above-board activities. The economy of the USA during the 19^th century and in the years of prohibition was partly criminal. It is reminiscent of the Russian economy in the 1990s, permeated by criminal conduct as it is. Russians often compare their stage of capitalist evolution to the American "Wild West".

Piggyback Service Economies - These are economies, which provide predator economies with services. These services are aimed at re-establishing economic equilibrium in the host (predator) economies. Tax shelters are a fine example of this variety. In many countries taxes are way too high and result in the misallocation of economic resources. Tax shelters offer a way of re-establishing the economic balance and re-instating a regime of efficient allocation of resources. These economies could be regarded as external appendages, shock absorbers and regulators of their host economies. They feed off market failures, market imbalances, arbitrage opportunities, shortages and inefficiencies. Many post-Communist countries have either made the provision of such services a part of their economic life or are about to do so. Free zones, off shore havens, off shore banking and transhipment ports proliferate, from Macedonia to Archangelsk.

Aid Economies - Economies that derive most of their vitality from aid granted them by donor countries, multilateral aid agencies and NGOs. Many of the economies in transition belong to this class. Up to 15% of their GDP is in the form of handouts, soft loans and technical assistance. Rescheduling is another species of financial subsidy and virtually all CEE countries have benefited from it. The dependence thus formed can easily deteriorate into addiction. The economic players in such economies engage mostly in lobbying and in political manoeuvring - rather than in production.

Derivative or Satellite Economies - These are economies, which are absolutely dependent upon or very closely correlated with other economies. This is either because they conduct most of their trade with these economies, or because they are a (marginal) member of a powerful regional club (or aspire to become one), or because they are under the economic (or geopolitical or military) umbrella of a regional power or a superpower. Another variant is the single-commodity or single-goods or single-service economies. Many countries in Africa and many members of the OPEC oil cartel rely on a single product for their livelihood. Russia, for instance, is heavily dependent on proceeds from the sale of its energy products. Most Montenegrins derive their livelihood, directly or indirectly, from smuggling, bootlegging and illegal immigration. Drugs are a major "export" earner in Macedonia and Albania.

Copycat Economies - These are economies that are based on legal or (more often) illegal copying and emulation of intellectual property: patents, brandnames, designs, industrial processes, other forms of innovation, copyrighted material, etc. The prime example is Japan, which constructed its whole mega-economy on these bases. Both Bulgaria and Russia are Meccas of piracy. Though prosperous for a time, these economies are dependent on and subject to the vicissitudes of business cycles. They are capital sensitive, inherently unstable and with no real long term prospects if they fail to generate their own intellectual property. They reflect the volatility of the markets for their goods and are overly exposed to trade risks, international legislation and imports. Usually, they specialize in narrow segments of manufacturing which only increases the precariousness of their situation.

The Predator Economies can also be classified:

Generators of Intellectual Property - These are economies that encourage and emphasize innovation and progress. They reward innovators, entrepreneurs, non-conformism and conflict. They spew out patents, designs, brands, copyrighted material and other forms of packaged human creativity. They derive most of their income from licensing and royalties and constitute one of the engines driving globalization. Still, these economies are too poor to support the complementary manufacturing and marketing activities. Their natural counterparts are the "Industrial Bases". Within the former Eastern Bloc, Russia, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia are, to a limited extent, such generators. Israel is such an economy in the Middle East.

Industrial Bases - These are economies that make use of the intellectual property generated by the former type within industrial processes. They do not copy the intellectual property as it is. Rather, they add to it important elements of adaptation to niche markets, image creation, market positioning, packaging, technical literature, combining it with other products or services, designing and implementing the whole production process, market (demand) creation, improvement upon the originals and value added services. These contributions are so extensive that the end products, or services can no longer to be identified with the originals, which serve as mere triggers. Again, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia (and to a lesser extent, Croatia) come to mind.

Consumer Oriented Economies - These are Third Wave (Alvin Toffler's term), services, information and knowledge driven economies. The over-riding set of values is consumer oriented. Wealth formation and accumulation are secondary. The primary activities are concerned with fostering markets and maintaining them. These "weightless" economies concentrate on intangibles: advertising, packaging, marketing, sales promotion, education, entertainment, servicing, dissemination of information, knowledge formation, trading, trading in symbolic assets (mainly financial), spiritual pursuits, and other economic activities which enhance the consumer's welfare (pharmaceuticals, for instance). These economies are also likely to sport a largish public sector, most of it service oriented. No national economy in CEE qualifies as "Consumer Oriented", though there are pockets of consumer-oriented entrepreneurship within each one.

The Trader Economies - These economies are equivalent to the cardiovascular system. They provide the channels through which goods and services are exchanged. They do this by trading or assuming risks, by providing physical transportation and telecommunications, and by maintaining an appropriately educated manpower to support all these activities. These economies are highly dependent on the general health of international trade. Many of the CEE economies are Trader economies. The openness ratio (trade divided by GDP) of most CEE countries is higher than the G7 countries'. Macedonia, for instance, has a GDP of 3.6 Billion US dollars and exports and imports of c. 2 billion US dollars. These are the official figures. Probably, another 0.5 billion Us dollars in trade go unreported. additionally, it has one of the lowest weighted customs rate in the world. Openness to trade is an official policy, actively pursued.

These economies are predatory in the sense that they engage in zero-sum games. A contract gained by a Slovenian company - is a contract lost by a Croatian one. Luckily, in this last decade, the economic cake tended to grow and the sum of zero sum games was more welfare to all involved. These vibrant economies - the hope of benighted and blighted regions - are justly described as "engines" because they pull all other (scavenger) economies with them. They are not likely to do so forever. But their governments have assimilated the lessons of the 1930s. Protectionism is bad for everyone involved - especially for economic engines. Openness to trade, protection of property rights and functioning institutions increase both the number and the scope of markets.

Education (in Countries in Transition)

October 2002 has been a busy month in central and eastern Europe, at least as far as education goes. "Kliment and Metodius" university in Skopje, Macedonia went on investigating forged diplomas issued to its students - and staff - in the economics faculty by Bulgarian diploma mills.

Similar allegations - of forged or hawked academic credentials - surface periodically against politicians and scholars in all the countries in transition - from Russia to Yugoslavia. Underpaid professors throughout the region have been accused in the local media of demanding - and receiving - bribes, including sexual favors, to tinker with exam marks.

The denizens of central and east Europe are schizophrenic about their education system. On the one hand, they are proud of its achievements. According to the 1996 Third International Maths and Science Study, The Czech Republic and Slovakia fared better than Switzerland and Netherlands in mathematics.

Hungary and Russia beat Australia, Ireland, Canada, Belgium, Israel, Sweden, Germany, England, Norway, Denmark, the United States and a host of other Western heavyweights. The situation with science skills was even better with the Czech Republic in the second place out of 41 countries, Bulgaria ranked fifth, Slovenia seventh, Hungary ninth and Russia in the fourteenth rung. This stellar showing defied low spending per pupil and high number of students per class in these mostly poor countries.

But corruption is endemic, libraries and laboratories are poorly stocked, state institutions are cash-strapped and certain subjects - such as computer science, foreign languages, international law, business administration, and even economics - are poorly taught by Soviet-era educators. Hence the clamor for private and foreign alternatives. Brain drain is rampant. According to government figures, 82,000 youths - 4 percent of its total population - left Macedonia since 1991 to study abroad. Most of them never bother to return.

Foreign information technology firms are forced to open their facilities to cater to their growing needs for skills. In July, the first Cisco Certified Network Associate Academy on the Balkans was opened in the building of the Bulgarian Industrial Association (BIA).

Neighboring countries, such as Italy and Greece, aware of Bulgaria's cheap but well-educated cadre, have set up bilateral cooperation schemes to tap it. Italy now allows Bulgarians to spend six months on work and study in Italian institutions. Both Uni Credito Italiano and Bulbank are offering interest-free loans to the would-be students.

Bulgaria signed with Greece a 2 year cooperation agreement including a student exchange program. The Serbian government submitted last week 11 projects worth $164 million to be funded the Greek Plan for Economic Reconstruction of the Balkan. Part of the money will be spent on educational schemes. Turkey is eyeing Macedonia. In a visit in august, the Turkish minister of education pledged to invest in eastern Macedonia home to a sizable Turkish minority.

Foreign establishments are sometimes regarded by xenophobic locals as cultural, social, and political beachheads. The excellent university of Blagoevgrad in Bulgaria is only half-jokingly known as "CIA University" due to the massive amounts of American funding and the number of American lecturers. It happens to straddle the border with Serbia, a one-time foe of the United States. The Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, funded with hundreds of millions of dollars from George Soros' fortune, has been subject to head-spinning conspiracy theories ever since it was founded in 1991.

But the most encouraging trend by far is the privatization of education, hitherto the patronage fief of politicians, trade unions, and state bureaucrats. According to The Economist Armenia had last year 69 private institutions of higher education with 20,000 students. Bulgaria had 9 with 28,000 students and Hungary had 32 with 28,000 undergraduates. The record belongs to Poland - 195 private institutions with 378,000 learners, one quarter of the total. Much smaller Romania had 54 establishments with 131,000 pupils - one third of all students in higher education.

Some of these private schools are joint ventures with enterprising municipalities. According to Mediapoolbg.com, the newly opened program of business administration offered by the City University in Pravets, Bulgaria and the International Higher Business School plans to teach management, e-commerce and information technologies.

The curriculum is subsidized by the US Congress and the Ministry of Education and Science. For an annual fee of $2500, students will attend classes taught by both Bulgarian and American lecturers and receive a dual Bulgarian and American diploma. City University offers both distance learning and classroom instruction in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece.

There is an intra-regional demand for successful managers of private educational facilities. The Regional Vice President of the aforementioned branch of City University in Bulgaria is Jan Rebro, a Slovak, who previously served as Chairman of College of Management, the first private college in Slovakia.

Education in these parts is not a luxury. According to a 1999 government report about unemployment, less than 2 percent of university graduates are unemployed in Macedonia - compared to more than 40 percent of the unskilled. In July, the Bulgarian National Statistics Institute published a survey of micro-enterprises, about 92 percent of all businesses in the country. The vast majority of all the owners-entrepreneurs turned out to be highly educated.

Governments are aware of the correlation between education and prosperity. The Serb authorities are offering 6-months interest-free loans to buy school books and supplies. HINA, the Croat news agency, published last month a government blueprint for countering the declining numbers of high school and college students over the past ten years and a drop in the quality of education. Only seven per cent of the population ever attend college and just over one third of these actually graduate.

But the countries of central and eastern Europe would do well not to fall into the sequential traps of Western education. As Alison Wolf recounts in her recently published tome “Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth” (Penguin Books, 2002), an obsession with quantitative targets in education reduces its quality and adversely affects economic growth.

Moreover, educational issues often serve as proxy for national agendas. Years of bloody clashes between Macedonians and Albanians in western Macedonia led, last year, following intense arm-twisting by the international community, to the opening of the Southeast Europe University in Albanian-dominated Tetovo. In a country still torn by inter-ethnic strife and daily violent clashes in mixed schools, the university is "committed to the Albanian culture, language, and population".

About half its board is comprised of nationalistic political activists. Bilingual education was always one of the chief demands of the Albanian minority. Yet, the opening of the university in February last year did nothing to forestall an armed uprising of Albanian rebels.

Similarly, equal educational opportunities tops the agenda of the 4-5 million Romas (gypsies) in central Europe and the Balkan. Last November, Save the Children, a charity, reported that two thirds of Roma children never attend school. Most of the rest are shunted off by hostile governments to special schools for the mentally challenged and drop out by age 15.

One in thousand ever makes it past the bullying and the bureaucratic hurdles to a university. Pressured by international public opinion and the European Union, governments reluctantly allowed private groups in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia to acquaint Roma toddlers with the indigenous languages so as to qualify them for a regular primary school.

Finally, caveat emptor. Some "private institutions" - especially distance learning diploma mills - front for scam artists. The quality of instructors and lecturers - most of them moonlighting between jobs in state institutions - is often questionable. Curricula are rarely effectively scrutinized and controlled and there is no proper process of accreditation. Annual fees are high and equal a few years to a few decades of average pay. Links and joint ventures with foreign universities help but cannot substitute for structured and continued oversight.

Can Socialist Professors of Economics Teach Capitalism?

Capitalism cannot be "learned" or "imported" or "emulated" or "simulated". Capitalism (or, rather, liberalism) is not only a theoretical construct. It is not only a body of knowledge. It is a philosophy, an ideology, a way of life, a mentality and a personality.

This is why professors of economics who studied under Socialism can never teach Capitalism in the truest sense of the word. No matter how intelligent and knowledgeable (and a minority of them are) - they can never convey the experience, the practice, the instincts and reflexes, the emotional hues and intellectual pugilistics that real, full scale, full blooded Capitalism entails. They are intellectually and emotionally castrated by their socialist past of close complicity with inefficiency, corruption and pathological economic thinking.

This is why workers and managers inherited from the socialist-communist period can never function properly in a Capitalist ambience. Both were trained at civil disobedience through looting their own state and factories. Both grew accustomed to state handouts and bribes disguised as entitlements, were suspicious and envious at their own elites (especially their politicians and crony professors), victims to suppressed rage and open, helpless, degrading dependence. Such workers and managers - no matter how well intentioned and well qualified or skilled - are likely to sabotage the very efforts whose livelihood depends on.

When the transition period of post-communist economies started, academics, journalists and politicians in the West talked about the "pent up energies" of the masses, now to be released through the twin processes of privatization and democratization. This metaphor of humans as capitalistically charged batteries waiting to unleash their stored energy upon their lands - was realistic enough. People were, indeed, charged: with pathological envy, with rage, with sadism, with pusillanimity, with urges to sabotage, to steal, to pilfer. A tsunami of destruction, a tidal wave of misappropriation, an orgy of crime and corruption and nepotism and cronyism swept across the unfortunate territories of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Transition was perceived by the many either as a new venue for avenging the past and for visiting the wrath of the masses upon the heads of the elites - or as another, accelerated, mode of stripping the state naked of all its assets. Finally, the latter propensity prevailed. The old elites used the cover of transition to enrich themselves and their cronies, this time "transparently" and "legally". The result was a repulsive malignant metastasis of capitalism, devoid of the liberal ideals or practices, denuded of ethics, floating in a space free of functioning, trusted  institutions.

While the masses and their elites in CEE were busy scavenging, the West engaged in impotent debate between a school of "shock therapists" and a school of "institution builders". The former believed that appearances will create reality and that reality will alter consciousness (sounds like Marxism to me). Rapid privatization will generate a class of instant capitalists who, in turn, will usher in an era of real, multi-dimensional liberalism. The latter believed that the good wine of Capitalism can be poured only to the functioning receptacles of liberalism. They advocated much longer transition periods in which privatization will come only after the proper institutions were erected. Both indulged in a form of central planning. IMF-ism replaced Communism. The international financial institutions and their hordes of well-paid, well-accommodated experts - replaced the Central Committee of the party. Washington replaced Moscow. It was all very familiar and cosy.

Ever the adapters, the former communist elites converted to ardent capitalism. With the fervour with which they had recited Marxist slogans in their past - they chanted capitalist sobriquets in the present. It was catechism, uttered soullessly, in an alien language, in the marble cathedrals of capitalism in London and Washington. There was commitment or conviction behind it and it was tainted by organized crime and all-pervasive corruption. The West was the new regime to be suckered and looted and pillaged and drained. The deal was simple: mumble the mantras of the West, establish Potemkin institutions, keep peace and order in your corner of the world, give the West strategic access to your territory. In return the West will turn a blind eye to the worst excesses and to worse than excesses. This was the deal struck in Russia with the "reformists", in Yugoslavia with Milosevic, the "peacemaker", in the Czech Republic with Klaus the "economic magician" of Central Europe. It was communism all over: a superpower buying influence and colluding with corrupt elites to rob their own nations blind.

It could have been different.

Post-war Japan and Germany are two examples of the right kind of reconstruction and reforms. Democracy took real root in these two former military regimes. Economic prosperity was long lived because democracy took hold. And the ever tenuous, ever important trust between the citizens and their rulers and among themselves was thus enhanced.

Trust is really the crux of the matter.

Economy is called the dismal science because it pretends to be one, disguising its uncertainties and shifting fashions with mathematical formulae. Economy describes the aggregate behaviour of humans and, in this restricted sense, it is a branch of psychology.

People operate within a marketplace and attach values to their goods and services and to their inputs (work, capital, natural endowments) through the price mechanism. This elaborate construct, however, depends greatly on trust. If people were not to trust each other and / or the economic framework (within which they interact) - economic activities would have gradually ground to a halt. A clear inverse relationship exists between the general trust level and the level of economic activity.

There are four major types of trust:

1. 
   Trust related to Intent - the market players assume that other players are (generally) rational, that they have intentions, that these intentions conform with the maximization of benefits and that people are likely to act on their intentions.
   

2. 
   Trust related to Liquidity - the market players assume that other players possess or have access, or will possess, or will have access to the liquid means needed in order to materialize their intentions and that - barring force majeure - this liquidity is the driving force behind the formation of these intentions. People in possession of liquidity wish to maximize the returns on their money and are driven to economically transact.
   

3. 
   Trust related to knowledge and ability - the market players assume that other players possess or have access to, or will possess, or will have access to the know-how, technology and intellectual property and wherewithal necessary to materialize their intention (and, by implication, the transactions that they enter into). Another assumption is that all the players are "enabled": physically, mentally, legally and financially available and capable to perform their parts as agreed between the players in each and every particular transaction. A hidden assumption is that the players evaluate themselves properly: that they know their strengths and weaknesses, that they have a balanced picture of themselves and realistic set of expectations, self esteem and self confidence to support that worldview (including a matching track record). Some allowance is made for "game theory" tactics: exaggeration, disinformation, even outright deception - but this allowance should not overshadow the merits of the transaction and its inherent sincerity.
   

4. 
   Trust related to the Economic horizon and context - the market players assume that the market will continue to exist as an inert system, unhindered by external factors (governments, geopolitics, global crises, changes in accounting policies, hyperinflation, new taxation - anything that could deflect the trajectory of the market). They, therefore, have an "investment or economic horizon" to look forward to and upon which they can base their decisions. They also have cultural, legal, technological and political contexts within which to operate. The underlying assumptions of stability are very much akin to the idealized models that scientists study in the accurate sciences (indeed, in economy as well).
   

When one or more of these basic building blocks of trust is fractured that the whole edifice of the market crumbles. Fragmentation ensues, more social and psychological than economic in nature. This is very typical of poor countries with great social and economic polarization. It is also very typical of countries "in transition" (a polite way to describe a state of total shock and confusion). People adopt several reaction patterns to the breakdown in trust:

1. 
   Avoidance and isolation - they avoid contact with other people and adopt reclusive behaviour. The number of voluntary interactions decreases sharply.
   

2. 
   Corruption - People prefer shortcuts to economic benefits because of the collapse of the horizon trust (=they see no long term future and even doubt the very continued existence of the system).
   

3. 
   Crime - Criminal activity increases.
   

4. 
   Fantastic and Grandiose delusions to compensate for a growing sense of uncertainty and fear and for a complex of inferiority. This nagging feeling of inferiority is the result of the internalization of the image of the people in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. This is a self-reinforcing mechanism (vicious circle). The results are under-confidence and a handicapped sense of self esteem. The latter undulates and fluctuates from overvaluation of one's self and others to devaluation of both.
   

5. 
   Hypermobility - People are not loyal to the economic cells within which they function. They switch a lot of jobs, for instance, or ignore contracts that they made. The concepts of exclusivity, the sanctity of promises, loyalty, future, a career path - all get eroded. As a result, there is no investment in the future (in the acquisition of skills or in long term investments, to give but two examples).
   

6. 
   Cognitive Dissonance - The collapse of the social and economic systems adversely affects the individual. One of the classic defence mechanisms is the cognitive dissonance. The person involved tells himself that he really chose and wanted his way of life, his decrepit environment, his low standard of living, etc. ("We are poor because we chose not to be like the inhuman West").
   

7. 
   The Pathological Envy - The Cognitive Dissonance is often coupled with a pathological envy (as opposed to benign jealousy). This is a destructive type of envy which seeks to deprive others of their successes and possessions. It is very typical of societies with a grossly unequal distribution of wealth.
   

8. 
   The Mentality (or the Historical) Defences - these are defence mechanisms which make use of an imagined mentality problem ("we are like that, we have been like this for ages now, nothing to do, we are deformed") - or build upon some historical pattern, or invented pattern ("we have been enslaved and submissive for five centuries - what can you expect").
   

9. 
   The Passive-Aggressive reaction: occurs mainly when the market players have no access to more legitimate and aggressive venues of reacting to their predicament or when they are predisposed to suppressing of aggression (or when they elect to not express it). The passive-aggressive reactions are "sabotage"-type reactions: slowing down of the work, "working by the book", absenteeism, stealing from the workplace, fostering and maintaining bureaucratic procedures and so on.
   

10. 
    The inability to postpone satisfaction - The players regress to a child-like state, demanding immediate satisfaction, unable to postpone it and getting frustrated, aggressive and deceiving if they are required to do so by circumstances. They engage in short term activities, some criminal, some dubious, some legitimate: trading and speculation, gambling, short termism.
    

The results are, usually, catastrophic:

 A reduction in economic activity, in the number of interactions and in the field of economic potentials (the product of all possible economic transactions).

 An erosion of the human capital, its skills and availability.

 Brain drain - skilled people desert, en masse, the fragmented economic system and move to more sustainable ones.

 Resort to illegal and to extra-legal activities.

 Social and economic polarization. Interethnic tensions and tensions between the very rich and the very poor tend to erupt and to explode.

And this is where most countries in transition are at right now. To a large extent, it is the fault of their elites. Providing orientation and guidance is supposed to be their function and why society invests in them. But the elites in all countries in transition - tainted by long years of complicity in the unseemly and the criminal - never exerted moral or intellectual authority over their people. At the risk of sounding narcissistic, allow me to quote myself (from "The Poets and the Eclipse"). Replace "intellectuals of the Balkan" with "intellectuals of the countries in transition":

"The intellectuals of the Balkans - a curse, not in disguise. a nefarious presence, ominous, erratic and corrupt. Sometimes, at the nucleus of all conflict and mayhem - at other times (of ethnic cleansing or suppression of the media) conspicuously absent. Zeligs of umpteen disguises and ever-changing, shimmering loyalties.

They exert no moderating, countervailing influence - on the contrary, they radicalize, dramatize, poison and incite. Intellectuals are prominent among all the nationalist parties in the Balkans - and rare among the scant centre parties that have recently sprung out of the ashes of communism.

They do not disseminate the little, outdated knowledge that they do possess. Rather they keep it as a guild would, unto themselves, jealously. In the vanity typical of the insecure, they abnegate all foreign knowledge. They rarely know a second language sufficiently to read it. They promote their brand of degreed ignorance with religious zeal and punish all transgressors with fierceness and ruthlessness. They are the main barriers to technology transfers and knowledge enhancement in this wretched region. Their instincts of self preservation go against the best interests of their people. Unable to educate and teach - they prostitute their services, selling degrees or corrupting themselves in politics. They make up a big part of the post communist nomenclature as they have a big part of the communist one. The result is economics students who never heard of Milton Friedman or Kenneth Arrow and students of medicine who offer sex or money or both to their professors in order to graduate.

Thus, instead of advocating and promoting freedom and liberalization - they concentrate on the mechanisms of control, on manipulating the worn levers of power. They are the dishonest brokers of corrupted politicians and their businessmen cronies. They are heavily involved - oft times the initiators - of suppression and repression, especially of the mind and of the spirit. The black crows of nationalism perched upon their beleaguered ivory towers.

The intellectuals of the Balkans failed miserably. Terrified by the sights and sounds of their threatened territory - they succumbed to obscurantism, resorted to the nostalgic, the abstract and the fantastic, rather than to the pragmatic. This choice is evident even in their speech. Marred by centuries of cruel outside domination - it is all but meaningless. No one can understand what a Balkanian has to say. Both syntax and grammar are tortured into incomprehensibility. Evasion dominates, a profusion of obscuring verbal veils, twists and turns hiding a vacuous deposition.

The Balkan intellectuals chose narcissistic self absorption and navel gazing over 'other-orientation'. Instead of seeking integration (as distinct from assimilation) - they preach and practice isolation. They aim to differentiate themselves not in a pluralistic, benign manner - but in vicious, raging defiance of 'mondialism' (a Serbian propaganda term). To define themselves AGAINST all others - rather than to compare and learn from the comparison. Their love affair with a (mostly concocted) past, their future-phobia, the ensuing culture shock - all follow naturally from the premises of their disconsolate uniqueness. Balkan intellectuals are all paranoids. Scratch the surface, the thin, bow tied, veneer of 'kultur' - and you will find an atavistic poet, fighting against the very evil wrought by him and by his actions. This is the Greek tragedy of this breathtaking region. Nature here is cleverer than humans. It is exactly their conspiracies that bring about the very things they have to conspire against in the first place.

All over the world, intellectuals are the vanguard, the fifth column of new ideas, the resistance movement against the occupation of the old and the banal. Here intellectuals preach conformity, doing things the old, proven way, protectionism against the trade of liberal minds. All intellectuals here - fed by the long arm of the state - are collaborators. True, all hideous regimes had their figleaf intellectuals and with a few exceptions, the regimes in the Balkans are not hideous. But the principle is the same, only the price varies. Prostituting their unique position in semi-literate, village-tribal societies - intellectuals in the Balkans sold out en masse. They are the inertial power - rather than the counterfist of reform. They are involved in politics of the wrong and doomed kind. The Balkan would have been better off had they decided to remain aloof, detached in their archipelago of universities.

There is no real fire in Balkan intellectuals. Oh, they get excited and they shout and blush and wave their hands ever so vigorously. But they are empty. It is full gas in neutral. They get nowhere because they are going nowhere. They are rational and conservative and some are emotional and "leftist". But it is all listless and lifeless, like the paces of a very old mechanism, set in motion 80 years ago and never unwound.

All that day of the eclipse of the last millennium, even the intellectuals stayed in their cellars and in their offices and did not dare venture out. They emerged when night fell, accustomed to the darkness, unable to confront their own eclipse, hiding from the evil influence of a re-emerging sun."

A Note on Resistance to Learning

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."
Epictetus

The denizens of the Balkans resist learning. They reject newfangled knowledge not because they are traditionalists - but because they are craven and because they are pragmatic.

Craven first:

In the paranoid and surrealistic landscape of the former Soviet Bloc, to admit to ignorance is to publicly acknowledge a deficiency, a personal defeat, and a shortcoming. It is to hand your foes a weapon. It is not only a narcissistic injury (and that it is), but also a guaranteed professional suicide.

Thus, in the interest of self-preservation, it is more advisable to invent "facts" than to search for them; to claim education than to seek it; and to feign erudition than to acquire it. Ill-informed professors pass on their half-baked notions and inane "theories" from one molested generation to another in a vast conspiracy aided by the lack of access to foreign texts and outside experts.

Insecurity bred by nescience yields conformity and rigid "conservatism". Toeing the line is a survival strategy, not rocking the boat a religious principle, the boorish quid pro quo of Luddites, quacks, and conspiracy theorists the only form of "higher education".

Inevitably, as a purely defensive posture, a monopoly of "learning" has emerged in all these geographical domains. Real knowledge, propounded by genuine (typically, Western) experts threatens to unravel this unholy cartel, counteract the vested interests it reifies, and shatter the ersatz "scholarship" it is founded upon. Hence the fierce objection to any outside "interference" and "intrusion". Provincialism and obscurantism are elevated to the level of an ideology.

Nor is there a grassroots movement of minds eager for intellectual edification and cross-fertilization. Education is a loss-making proposition. Formal training goes unrewarded in these nether regions. Nepotism and cronyism reign supreme. One's advancement, future prospects, and career depend on one's connections or family of origin. One's peers are perforce disqualified to judge one's progress and accomplishments, having been educated by the same inapts and oil snake salesmen that here pass for "professors". Indeed, why bother with textbooks and exams when social networking gets you places faster and far more securely?

Electricity (Markets in Central and Eastern Europe)

Russia's lower house, the Duma, debated, in November 29, 2002 a far reaching reform in the bloated and inefficient electricity generation sector. Worried by resurging inflation, the Russian government scrapped its plan to allow the Federal Energy Commission to fix tariffs for gas, power, and railways. A Commission spokesman complained to Moscow Times that government officials have overridden its authority to regulate the prices of natural monopolies. It threatened to take the matter to court.

Electricity throughout the former Soviet bloc is heavily subsidized. Governments are reluctant to raise prices to realistic levels lest they incur the wrath of their impoverished subjects and reignite dormant inflation. Fuel prices, government taxes, and variable costs, such as labor, have been rising steeply in the last decade but the electricity behemoths' ability to amend their tariffs to reflect these is politically curbed.

The Russian Unified Energy Systems electricity monopoly was allowed to up its prices in 2002 by a mere 14 percent - barely the rate of Russian inflation. Its chances to attract the $50 billion in investments it says it needs in the forthcoming 10 years are slim as long as it continues to charge its customers - both wholesale and retail - a fraction of the cost of electricity its West European counterparts charge theirs. A restructuring plan, approved by the government in May 2001, is going nowhere. The sale of loss making generating plants - even at bargain basement prices and to insiders - is impossible without a massive - and massively unpopular - boost to electricity prices.

Vociferous protests in Croatia in October 2002 forced the government to shelf a scheduled 9 percent hike in the price of electricity for domestic consumption. The IMF is displeased with the government's stranglehold over the energy sector and is pushing for liberalization. Slovakia's news agency, TASR, reported in November 2002 that thousands of members of the Trade Unions Confederation demonstrated in Bratislava against proposed budget cuts and increases in regulated prices, including electricity's.

Still, consumers will not be able to buck the trend forever. Even the rich countries of the region are facing already unsustainable electricity subsidy bills. The Slovenian news agency, STA, reported on November 14, 2002 that Slovenian producers of electricity and natural gas warned that - once the domestic market opens to foreign competition in January 2003 - they will be at a disadvantage due to the unrealistic electricity "price model". In hindsight, this proved to be wrong.

Yet, liberalization and privatization have acquired a bad name after the debacles in California and elsewhere in the world. Moreover, electricity generation depends on a free market in fuels - a rarity in central and eastern Europe. Prices cannot rise above the increase in net disposable income.

As infrastructure crumbles, replacement costs soar. The Albanian Daily News reported that in the 12 months to September 2002, Albania's electricity self-sufficiency decreased from 66 percent to 46 percent. Power cuts of up to 18 hours a day are not rare. The same applies to Kosovo, where an electric storm demolished the local generation plant in July 2002, and to Montenegro.

The dependence of many countries in transition on decrepit and antiquated nuclear power plants causes friction with the European Union. Austria and the Czech Republic have clashed over the much-disputed Temelin facility. Croatia and Slovenia are locked in a bitter dispute over their shared ownership of the Krsko nuclear plant.

Lithuania derives 78 percent of its power the atomic way. Slovakia gets 53 percent of its electricity from its reactors, Ukraine - 46 percent, Bulgaria, in the throes of a controversial plan to modernize its nuclear works in Kozloduy, 42 percent, Hungary and Slovenia - 39 percent.

Nor can pure market mechanisms solve the problem. Late in 2001, hundreds of Romas, having been cut off the grid for unpaid bills, demonstrated in Plovdiv and in Lom, Bulgaria. Remote and rural areas are poorly catered to even by state-owned utilities, let alone by privatized ones.In December 2001, the Romanian government restructured Electrica, an electricity utility, but wisely retained ownership of the long-distance distribution network.

Bulgaria is emerging as an energy hub. The cabinet is drafting a bill which calls for far-reaching liberalization. Subsidies for both electricity and heating would be phased out by 2006. The country is refurbishing its thermal power generation plants with an aim to reduce its dependence on oil, gas and coal imports from Russia and Ukraine.

Bulgaria is slated to establish a regional energy distribution coordination centre under the auspices of the Stability Pact. Bulgaria covers 40-50 percent of southeast Europe's entire electricity deficit every winter. It also exports electricity to Turkey and even to Romania. Italy and Greece are negotiating a transit agreement which will permit the former to import Bulgarian electricity through the latter's territory.

Bulgaria is not the only exporter. Romania, Croatia and even Bosnia sell power. In local terms, the market is sizable. Serbia's annual electricity import bill amounts to $100 million. In 2001, Bulgaria's exports to Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia reached $150 million. The annual figure is much higher since 2002. Romania doubled its electricity exports - mostly to Yugoslavia and Greece - during the first half of 2002 to $48 million.

Aware of this, the World Bank has recently increased the amount of money allocated to energy projects. In Albania alone, it has earmarked $16m to reconstruct three hydropower plants and another $1 million to install electricity meters in Shkoder, in the north. Even the pariah Republika Srpska, the Serb part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, stands to get $90 million to construct an electricity grid.

Multilateral funds will not be enough, though. Private capital is essential. In mid-2002, Macedonia has retained Austria's Meinl Bank to act as consultant and prepare within 11 months a sales strategy for the its national electricity company ESM. That won't be easy. The utility is in horrendous shape having served as the outgoing coalition's agency of patronage and cash cow. The country was reduced to importing more than one ninth of its consumption from Bulgaria. Indeed, real no progress was made by July 2005.

The more venal and xenophobic the political class, the less welcome are foreign investors. The Moldovan government seeks to annul the sale, in 2000, of three electricity distribution companies to Union Fenosa, a Spanish energy group. The World Bank is furious. Moldovan announcements of massive exports of electricity to Romania were greeted with derision by the alleged client.

Private investors, though, seem to have lost their appetite for bloated state monopolies. According to Albania's Ministry of Industry and Energy, even a giant like General Electric prefers to build 10 small thermal power plants in the country's larger cities. Other investors are interested in 23 hydropower plants about to be privatized.

Some utilities choose to tap the capital markets. Romania's Hidroelectrica launched a Eurobond issue of more than 120 million euros to improve hydropower equipment. Parex Bank and the Baltic investment company, Suprema, organized a consortium to lend $25 million to reconstruct one of Riga's thermoelectric power stations.

Electricity is no longer merely a national affair, but, rather, a regional one. A memorandum regarding the establishment of a southeast European energy market and its ultimate integration with the European Union's was signed In mid-November 2002 in Athens by ministers from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, Romania and Yugoslavia. These represent a market with more than 55 million consumers who will be able to buy power directly from generating utilities by 2005, pledged the document. As it turned out, another pipe dream.

But this touches upon a second conundrum. Households and firms don't pay their bills. The threat of widespread social unrest prevents the utilities from cutting them off. Better metering is one solution. The InvestRomania business daily reports that the national electricity company, Transelectrica, backed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, signed a $20 million contract with the Swiss firm Landis&Gyr to install remote counters of wholesale electricity. The hope is that with resumed growth and rising incomes this problem will vanish together with the currently common blackouts and brownouts.

Interview with Aleksandar Dimishkovski of BID Consulting, Macedonia

Conducted: September 2007

Until recently and for four years, Aleksandar Dimishkovski  worked as a business and finance correspondent in Macedonia's best-selling daily newspaper, "Dnevnik". In the past year, he also served as a personal advisor to the general manager of a foreign-owned company that has established its network in Macedonia. He is known as a market analyst and a business consultant and has recently founded "BID Consulting".