Skip to main content

Home/ Global Economy/ Group items tagged poland

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Gene Ellis

Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Midsize Cities in Poland Develop as Service Hubs for Outsourcing Industry
  • Part of Poland’s edge derives from the fact that it has yet to join the euro currency union. Its currency, the zloty, has been relatively stable against the world’s reserve currencies in the last year.
  • (The public sector, employing about a quarter of Poland’s 15.7 million workers, is still the country’s largest source of jobs.)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • industry specialists say Poland must move into more sophisticated services, like research and development, to continue attracting investment and corporate clients.
  • “The question for Poland is, ‘How do I move up the value chain?' ” said Peter Schumacher, chief executive of the Value Leadership Group, a management consultancy based in Frankfurt and New York. “How can I go from basic process management work to more sophisticated creative work?”
Gene Ellis

Poland, Wedded to Coal, Spurns Europe on Clean Energy Targets - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Poland, Wedded to Coal, Spurns Europe on Clean Energy Targets
Gene Ellis

Marek Belka examines the hurdles that Polish policymakers must surmount prior to euro m... - 0 views

  • Poland’s Eurozone Tests
  • As long as eurozone debts continue to rise and member economies diverge rather than converge, prospective members should also be stress-tested to see if they can withstand external shocks and sustain the membership criteria over the long term.
  • Rather, Poland simply combines low costs (including wages) and high-quality production.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • But competitiveness based on cost, rather than brand value or innovation, makes the Polish economy vulnerable.
  • And Poland’s cost advantage would disappear if the złoty were to strengthen sharply.
  • the country must be careful about joining the exchange rate mechanism (ERM II) – the narrow band within which applicant currencies must operate for at least two years prior to adopting the euro. Doing so could cause the złoty to strengthen, as it did to the Slovak koruna, and wipe out Poland’s competitive advantage.
  • One in four employees is on a fixed-term contract or self-employed.
  • But flexible labor markets have disadvantages, too. Companies tend not to invest in talent or develop new skills, and the quality of existing skills can suffer. In the longer run, flexible labor markets also increase structural unemployment and fuel the informal economy.
  • Finally, Poland needs sound public finances – that is, fiscal space for automatic stabilizers during economic crises.
Gene Ellis

Poland to push EU on coal mine subsidies - FT.com - 0 views

  • Poland to push EU on coal mine subsidies
Gene Ellis

Russia restricting Austria's gas supplies - The Local - 0 views

  • Russia restricting Austria's gas supplies
  • According to the energy regulator E-Control, Gazprom supplied Austria 15 percent less gas than had been previously agreed. Similar issues have hit Poland, which has seen their supplies cut by 45 percent, and Slovakia, which has ten percent less gas than expected for the period.
  • Poland on Thursday accused Russia's Gazprom of slashing gas deliveries by half, which analysts said was likely aimed at sending a message to the EU amid tensions over the Ukraine conflict.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "There's no risk to Polish clients," PGNiG spokeswoman Dorota Gajewska said, but added that it was forced to suspend its so-called "reverse flow" transfers to Ukraine.
  • The move caused the Russian ruble to plunge to another record low against the dollar on Thursday.
  • "It also can be seen as a kind of response to EU sanctions, targeting the smaller EU members in Moscow's former sphere of influence, not its larger Western partner." "But it's a risky policy, as it further undermines Moscow's credibility in Western Europe. It's not the best idea: either you're a reliable supplier of gas or you're not," he said.
Gene Ellis

Weaning Europe From Russian Gas - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Weaning Europe From Russian Gas
  • European Union leaders at a summit meeting last week made a commitment to cut their dependence on Russian gas.
  • Russia gets about 14 percent of its entire export earnings from the gas it sells to other European countries.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Some countries in Central Europe — such as Austria and the Czech Republic — and the Balkans would run out of gas they import through Ukraine.
  • that Russia cuts supplies of gas through Ukraine but continues pumping it through its other two pipelines to the West — one through the Baltic and the other through Poland.
  • In such a scenario,
  • The European Union also responded to the 2009 shutdown by building “interconnectors” between different countries. As a result, it is easier to shunt gas and electricity from countries that have excess energy to those that face a shortage — though these connections are still patchy and need to be built up.
  • n the short run, European Union countries can use more coal and less gas in their electricity generation.
  • The European Union can also increase imports of liquefied natural gas, mainly from Qatar. But there are problems. First, most of the Union’s L.N.G. terminals are in Western Europe, whereas it is the eastern part of the Union that is most vulnerable to a cutoff of Russian gas. So more terminals need to be built, which takes time. What’s more, L.N.G. is expensive — partly because Japan is buying lots of it after closing its nuclear plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
  • Longer term, European Union nations should embrace shale gas. It is cheap and local. Britain and Poland have the most potential.
  • Meanwhile, countries such as Germany should abandon their knee-jerk aversion to nuclear energy.
  • The problem is not the carbon goal, said Raoul Ruparel of Open Europe, a research institute. Rather it is the renewable target, which results in uneconomic wind and solar power being built across the Union.
Gene Ellis

Homeowners in Poland Borrowed in Swiss Francs, and Now Pay Dearly - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Homeowners in Poland Borrowed in Swiss Francs, and Now Pay Dearly
Gene Ellis

European Union Leaders Gather in Brussels Over Budget - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • He has threatened to veto any new budget that does not at least freeze spending,
  • “Europeans who are attached to the European Union are now in a minority.” Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said they felt little or no attachment, up seven percentage points since 2010. In Britain, only 27 percent felt attached to the union.
  • Ahead of this week’s negotiations, at least seven countries, mostly those that contribute more to Europe’s coffers than they get back in farm subsidies and other payments, have already warned that they may veto a budget that does not give them a better deal. Among these is Austria, where, according to Mr. Ehrenhauser, who sits on the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, “there is a critical mass building against the European Union.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The rethink, which would have scrapped spending on agricultural subsidies, ran into heavy opposition and stalled
  • All long-term budget decisions require unanimous approval by the member states, a rule first established when the grouping, then known as the European Economic Community, had just six members, not 27. The power of veto makes any major change to spending all but impossible and entrenches the status quo, no matter how unworkable or unpopular.
  • “It is extremely difficult to change anything,” Mr. Sapir said. “Everyone is always fighting at the margins over narrow national interests. They try to make sure they get money for their own countries and that cuts go to other countries.”
  • After months of arguments, two broad alliances have emerged. The first comprises countries like Britain, Germany and Sweden that are big net contributors and want to keep a tighter rein on spending. The second, known as the “Friends of Cohesion,” after a class of development grants aimed at less wealthy areas, includes Poland, Spain, Portugal and others that want to make sure the union’s largess does not dry up.
  • The European Commission, however, has been far less forthcoming. It told Mr. Ehrenhauser that it could not give a breakdown of spending in recent years on wine because that would require “lengthy research” and “it cannot consider doing this at the present time because of other priorities.”
Gene Ellis

A glance at military spending in NATO's European members | Fox News - 0 views

  • A glance at military spending in NATO's European members
  • 2.4 percent of GDP, British military spending exceeded $60 billion in 2013 — the highest of all European NATO members
  • 1.9 percent last year, according to NATO statistics.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • about 1.3 percent of GDP is devoted to the military.
  • Germany is reducing the size of its army, which is expected to slightly trim military spending in coming years.
  • 1.2 percent of its GDP on the military
  • 1.3 percent of its GDP on the military.
  • Poland's President Bronislaw Komorowski announced Tuesday that Poland would raise that figure to 2 percent as "a very tangible, very clear engagement" in the alliance
  • inancially challenged Spain's defense budget has shrunk from 1.2 percent of GDP in 2009 to 0.9 percent, NATO statistics show.
Gene Ellis

EU energy market: Pipe dream - FT.com - 0 views

  • EU energy market: Pipe dream
  • A more competitive market also means importing new sources of gas from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as building terminals for liquefied natural gas.
  • France’s nuclear industry was also reticent about cheap renewable energy streaming into the French grid on an uncertain timetable.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Spain’s grid is barely connected to France so its wind farms cannot export their production when it exceeds domestic demand. Similarly, solar and wind energy from southern Italy is wasted because it is not effectively linked to the industrial north.
  • Full energy convergence needs more than interconnectors. Widely divergent electricity prices are often determined by national tax rates. Grids that can respond to demand further afield in a continent-wide “supergrid” will need more direct (rather than alternating) current infrastructure. While it took Spain and France more than three decades to build a 64.5km interconnection, some 52,000km of lines need to be built or upgraded across the continent.
  • Poland argues that Gazprom has confidential data on each country it deals with, knowing its gas prices and infrastructure vulnerabilities. It can then use this data to its advantage, pushing some countries into more onerous contracts than others.
  • The advantage of a hub would become more apparent when new supplies from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean are integrated into the market by means of the so-called southern corridor supply route.
  • Geoffrey Feasey of the European Network of Transmission Systems Operators for Electricity says one-third of the most vital projects to connect Europe are being held up by “permitting and public acceptance”.
Gene Ellis

A European Energy Executive's Delicate Dance Over Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A European Energy Executive’s Delicate Dance Over Ukraine
  • Major Western oil companies like BP and Exxon Mobil have extensive exploration deals in Russia that they fear could be jeopardized if the United States and European Union impose stiffer sanctions on the Putin regime.
  • “This is by far the toughest time for European energy security that I have seen,” said Mr. Scaroni. “This issue might stop the supply of Russian gas.”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The goal is to be able to ship gas to Ukraine at an annual rate of more than three billion cubic meters by the time the heating season begins in the autumn, increasing the flow to up to 10 billion cubic meters annually by next spring. Last year Ukraine imported nearly 30 billion cubic meters of gas, according to a recent report by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
  • Part of his message is that, even though gas demand in Europe has been weak because of sluggish economies, imports from Russia actually rose last year by about 16 percent as other sources of supply including Norway and Algeria declined. Europe, he warned, is simply not prepared to do without gas from Russia.
  • But with the gradual introduction of more competitive pricing in the European markets, the gas business has become much less attractive for ENI and other big gas middlemen. They are stuck with high-priced long-term contracts to a handful of suppliers like Gazprom and Sonatrach, the Algerian state-owned company, while their customers are able to secure gas at often lower spot market prices — assuming the gas is flowing.
  • The pipeline would be a major new source of Russian gas for energy-hungry Europe. But European Union authorities have become deeply skeptical about the South Stream plan, seeing it as just another way of making Europe more dependent on Russian energy.
  • Given the balance of interests, tighter sanctions by Western governments might more likely aim to stem the technology that Russia needs to increase its future production, rather than to cut off gas supplies to Europe,
  • hose outages in 2006 and 2009 are a top reason that the European Union had already been trying to chip away at Europe’s dependence on Russia even before the Crimea annexation.
  • One of the most acrimonious battles is between the bloc’s antitrust authorities and Gazprom. That standoff began in 2011 when the European Commission carried out surprise raids on natural gas companies across Europe, including Gazprom affiliates, seeking evidence of blocking access to networks, charging excessive prices and raising barriers to diversification of supplies.
  • That is partly because powerful Eastern European countries like Poland argue that such clean-energy policies would impede their ability to reduce Russian dependence by mining more coal or developing their own shale gas resources.
  • nd this month, the European Commission issued rules aimed at reducing the subsidies that governments use to support the wind and solar industries,
Gene Ellis

Is Europe's gas supply threatened by the Ukraine crisis? | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Is Europe's gas supply threatened by the Ukraine crisis?
  • more than a quarter of the EU's total gas needs were met by Russian gas, and some 80% of it came via Ukrainian pipelines. Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland soon reported gas pressure in their own pipelines was down by as much as 30%.
  • While it was eventually resolved through a complex deal that saw Ukraine buying gas from Russia (at full price) and Turkmenistan (at cut price) via a Swiss-registered Gazprom subsidiary
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • But three years later, the same row erupted again: Gazprom demanded a price hike to $400-plus from $250, Kiev flatly refused, and on New Year's day 2009, Gazprom began pumping only enough gas to meet the needs of its customers beyond Ukraine.
  • Again, the consequences were marked. Inevitably, Russia accused Ukraine of siphoning off supplies meant for European customers to meet its own needs, and cut supplies completely
  • several countries – particularly in south-eastern Europe, almost completely dependent on supplies from Ukraine – simply ran out of gas.
  • Bulgaria shut down production in its main industrial plants; Slovakia declared a state of emergency
  • Many industry experts, though, point out that the world has changed since 2009, and that there are any number of reasons why Moscow's natural gas supplies may not prove quite the potent economic and diplomatic weapon they once were.
  • higher than normal temperatures are forecast to continue for several weeks yet, significantly reducing demand for gas and leaving prices at their lowest for two years
  • since the first "gas war" of 2006, many European countries have made huge efforts to increase their gas storage capacity and stocks are high. Some countries, such as Bulgaria, Slovakia and Moldova, which lack large storage capacity and depend heavily on gas supplies via Ukraine, would certainly suffer from any disruption in supplies
  • New Gazprom pipelines via Belarus and the Baltic Sea to Germany (Nord Stream) have cut the proportion of Gazprom's Europe-bound exports that transit via Ukraine to around half the total, meaning only about 15% of Europe's gas now relies on Ukraine's pipelines. Gazprom is also planning a Black Sea pipeline (South Stream), expected in 2015, meaning its exports to Europe will bypass Ukraine completely. Ukraine itself has cut its domestic gas consumption by nearly 40% over the past few years, halving its imports from Russia in the process.
  • Europe is increasingly installing specialist terminals that will allow gas to be imported from countries such as Qatar in the form of liquefied natural gas – while Norway's Statoil sold more gas to European countries in 2012 than Gazprom did. "Since the Russian supply cuts of 2006 and 2009, the tables have totally turned," Anders åslund, an energy advisor to both the Russian and Ukrainian governments, told the Washington Post.
  • Europe accounts for around a third of Gazprom's total gas sales, and around half of Russia's total budget revenue comes from oil and gas. Moscow needs that source of revenue, and whatever Vladimir Putin's geo-political ambitions, most energy analysts seem to agree he will think twice about jeopardising it.
Gene Ellis

Shifting energy trends blunt Russia's natural-gas weapon - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • As clunky Soviet-era factories and mines have become more efficient or gone out of business, Ukraine’s domestic gas consumption has dropped nearly 40 percent over the past five years, cutting its imports from Russia in half, according to a report by Sberbank Investment Research.
  • Domestic consumption might drop further if Ukraine trims the generous subsidies it gives households using natural gas, although so few households are paying their bills that it might not matter. “People will go from not paying the lower price to not paying the higher price,” said Thane Gustafson, senior director of Russian energy for the consulting firm IHS CERA.
  • Even if residential customers paid up, the Ukrainian state energy company, Naftogaz, would lose money on those sales
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “An inefficient and opaque energy sector continues to weigh heavily on public finances and the economy,” the International Monetary Fund said, noting that energy subsidies reached 7.5 percent of Ukraine’s GDP in 2012. “The very low tariffs for residential gas and district heating cover only a fraction of economic costs and encourage one of the highest energy consumption levels in Europe,” the IMF said in December.
  • Now, the upheaval of the past two weeks has thrown Ukraine’s gas strategy into greater confusion. “There is no government and there are no agencies to do business with,” said Simon Pirani, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “How high up the list of priorities it is is anyone’s guess.”
  • Even if the deals with foreign companies advance, Ukraine will need to import about half of its gas needs,
  • In 2012, many European industrial users and power plants switched to coal, and Russia agreed to renegotiate.
  • The link between gas and oil prices has been severed for about half of Russia’s gas sales.
  • Gazprom also agreed to eliminate contract clauses that said a country such as Germany could reship Russian gas only with Gazprom’s approval.
  • As a result, Ukraine ended up paying more than Gazprom’s customers in Germany, and last year Ukraine imported small quantities of natural gas from Germany and Hungary through pipelines in Slovakia and Poland, experts say. Germany buys gas from a variety of countries, but rerouted Russian gas has effectively been undercutting other Russian gas.
Gene Ellis

Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags
  • After years in which a combination of fiscal pressures and a complacent trust in the alliance’s protection may have led them to drop their guard,
  • many countries are building from a very limited ability and remain years away from fielding anything resembling a formidable force against a military as large as Russia’s.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • NATO asks member states to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their armed forces, yet only a handful of them actually do. Estonia, the small Baltic state at the alliance’s far eastern edge, is one of them, and Poland, by far the largest and richest country on that flank, is at 1.95 percent.
  • Latvia and Lithuania are spending less than 1 percent, though both have indicated they intend to ratchet up to 2 percent by 2020
  • But it will be a decade before the full impact of this modernization is felt in the field, he said.
  • The plan NATO has agreed on — to set up forward supply bases on the alliance’s eastern front in which 4,000 or so troops could be deployed within 48 hours — might be useful in combating a small, stealth insurgency, like the masked gunmen who arrived in Ukraine to set off that crisis, but would be useless in the face of an invasion. “What is required is to be able to hold off any aggression for at least a couple of weeks, to buy some time and provide some sort of sanctuary for reinforcements”
  • In recent years, Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops for exercises just across their borders.
  • When the Baltic states entered NATO a decade ago, they were urged not to spend their limited resources on building large standing armies, but to depend on others in the alliance to come to their aid in an emergency. Instead, the Baltic countries and other former Soviet satellite states focused their military spending on building specialties that they could offer the alliance, such as Estonia’s focus on cybersecurity
1 - 14 of 14
Showing 20 items per page