A partnership between bikes and trains ought to be one of transport’s natural pairings. In many parts of Europe that is no longer the case. A prominent railway campaigner known to this writer has a small travelling ritual. Before boarding some trains, he needs to fold his bicycle, zip it into a black bag and […]
Folded away was originally published on Emerging Europe.
The 21st century will be shaped not only by the rise of Asia, but by regions that connect continents, such as Central and Eastern Europe. For more than a generation, ‘ASEAN centrality’ has been one of the organising concepts of the Asian Century. It describes the ability of Southeast Asia to position itself at […]
Why CEE is matching ASEAN in centrality was originally published on Emerging…
Debate around worker compensation focuses on regulation. Far less attention is paid to the technology required to implement fair systems. The future of work is one of the defining debates of our time. As artificial intelligence transforms labour markets, a central question is emerging: how do we know what work is, who is doing […]
How ambient technology can benefit workers was originally…
The EU’s biometric frontier is a total mess, and while Brexit hasn’t helped, it is only half the reason. It’s implementation has been poor. On the morning of April 11, border officers at Lisbon, Porto and Faro switched off the European Union’s new Entry/Exit System (EES), let the queues drain, and turned it back on […]
Border line was originally published on Emerging Europe.
The best way for investment promotion agencies to reinvent is also the cheapest: place data-driven aftercare at the core of their pitches. Carolina Arriagada Peters convened the fourth Aftercare Forum in Riga last week, which ran under a banner reading Tech-Powered Aftercare. She has been making the case for years. Her 2022 book, the first […]
Aftercare or guesscare? was originally published on…
The Last Word: Not every graduate role will disappear. The issue is not the end of the junior career, but the need for firms to redesign it. For years, the first rung of professional life was built from work nobody especially loved. Junior bankers checked models. Consultants cleaned slides. Lawyers reviewed documents. Graduates wrote first […]
The first rung is vanishing was originally published…
A discussion that should focus on environmental impact and economic benefits risks becoming a proxy for ideological and cultural anxieties. The controversy current surrounding a proposed luxury tourism development on Albania’s southern coast has been presented largely as a battle between economic development and environmental protection. Critics warn of damage to a sensitive ecosystem near…
The eDiscovery market remains an American market through 2030, but the international share of worldwide spending is gradually rising. The eDiscovery market is, and remains, an American market. Reconciled estimates place worldwide US spending at approximately 12.94 billion US dollars in 2025 against 6.67 billion US dollars for the rest of the world combined—a 66-to-34 […]
Market Intelligence:…
The European Union has agreed to borrow 150 billion euros to rearm. Unusually, it is mainly the borrowers, not the lenders, who are unhappy. On March 12, Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s newly elected president, took to state television to veto a bill that would have unlocked 43.7 billion euros for the country’s defence ministry. He called […]
Loans of arms was originally published on Emerging Europe.
Europe is pouring money into the wrong end of its power grid. Distribution grids are what stand between households and cheaper energy bills. In March, Energinet, the operator of the Danish grid, stopped taking new connection requests. So many had piled up that adding new requests made little sense, given that more than 60 gigawatts […]
The last mile was originally published on Emerging Europe.
The trouble with treating FDI inflows as a national report card is that it’s often overly difficult to know what is, and what is not, FDI. In September 2024 the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union ordered Apple to repay 13 billion euros in back taxes to Ireland. The ruling […]
Direct, indirectly was originally published on Emerging Europe.
The Last Word: Those working on Central and Eastern Europe’s narrative should stop selling what they do, and start selling what they see. Ask a room why the GBS sector in Central and Eastern Europe works and the answer usually arrives in a tidy order: cost, talent, geography, incentives. It is the pitch-deck catechism. Reasonable […]
Eastern Europe’s next export is operating intelligence was…
Replacing GDP targets with wellbeing sounds appealing. Those (very) few countries that have tried it are retreating from the idea, however. Zack Polanski delivered his first major economic speech as Green Party leader in London in March. A Green government, he said, would scrap targets for gross domestic product and judge itself by how it […]
Beyond the bottom line was originally published on…
The EBRD’s annual gathering in Riga next month shows that there is a great deal of life left in what critics often dismiss as talking shops. Tomas Kairys, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s head of the Baltic states, told reporters in February that the Bank had invested a record 654 million euros across […]
Bank on it was originally published on Emerging Europe.
Across the Baltics and the Balkans, shrinking countries are betting everything on one major city. Entire regions risk being left in limbo. Adrian Nikolov of the Institute for Market Economics, a Sofia think-tank, published his annual regional analysis in February. Bulgaria’s capital, he reported, generated 46 billion euros in 2024, or 44 per cent of […]
Capital concentration was originally…
Malta has handed every citizen a free ChatGPT Plus account. Other countries will be more than interested in the results of the experiment. Ian Borg, Malta’s deputy prime minister, flew to Silicon Valley earlier this year to sign a contract no other government had signed before. On May 16 the deal was made public. Every […]
Sovereign by subscription was originally published on Emerging Europe.
The Last Word: A brand does not need to become a therapist, a guru or a life coach. In fact, brands should resist the temptation to do so. Somewhere between a running app reminding you to stretch, a language app nudging you back to a half-finished lesson, and a music platform telling you what your year […]
The brand is not the hero was originally published on Emerging Europe.
The EU’s Spring Economic Forecast shows a slowdown in growth as the energy shock drives up inflation and puts new strain on finances. It has not, to say the least, been the most promising of weeks for Europe’s economy. On May 21, the European Commission released its Spring Economic Forecast which, somewhat predictably, shows a […]
Spring of discontent was originally published on Emerging Europe.
Compliance carbon pricing is broadly working, and revenues are rising. However, the voluntary market that companies relied on is in trouble. Microsoft staff began calling carbon-removal developers in early April with awkward news. The world’s largest corporate buyer of credits used to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was putting purchases on hold. Bloomberg confirmed […]
Pricing in was…
No, one more lane will not make any difference: widening roads remains a fool’s errand. Cities that price driving honestly get fewer cars. Byron Hebert, the city administrator for Katy, Texas, told Community Impact in September 2025 that getting his fast-growing suburb moving meant widening every north-south road within reach. A few weeks earlier, Governor […]
Road rage was originally published…
Why mental health has become one of the biggest threats to press freedom, and why journalists increasingly need solid psychological support. For years journalism has been associated with resilience. Reporters are taught to move from one crisis to the next, to witness tragedy without losing focus and to keep working no matter how heavy the […]
Journalism’s silent crisis was originally published…
Anthropic just put Claude at the connecting node of the legal software stack, and anyone running a vendor evaluation this quarter is doing so against a new market structure. Last week, Anthropic turned Claude into a legal-software hub, releasing 20-plus integrations and 12 practice-area plugins that bring contracts, eDiscovery, research, and deal rooms under one […]
Claude for Legal arrives was…
Governments in rich countries are pushing up the cost of hiring despite possible alternatives for raising revenue not being in short supply. In December 2025 Rainer Kirchdörfer, chairman of Germany’s Foundation for Family Businesses, published the Stiftung’s annual monitor, a survey of 1,700 family-owned firms run by the Ifo Institute. More than 80 per cent […]
Driving a wedge was originally…
The Last Word: AI’s next battle is not the model, but the organisation. From ‘What can the model do?’ to ‘What can the organisation absorb?’ For the past few years, attention has centred on the models: who had the smartest system, the fastest capability gains and the most impressive demonstrations. But the more important battle […]
The AI race is entering a new phase was originally published on…
Kazakhstan’s economy is growing at a decent rate, but its workforce is not. Schools, vocational training, and adult skills must be improved. In January 2025, Chevron announced first oil from the Future Growth Project at the Tengiz field in western Kazakhstan. The 48 billion US dollars expansion, nearly a decade in construction, lifted Kazakh oil […]
Crude calculations was originally published on…
Mongolia has a bold plan, a surplus, and good demographics. The economy still runs on copper, however, and the copper boom is part of why. In May 2025, Mongolia’s State Training Fund announced a change to the country’s overseas-study loans. Until then, the most promising Mongolian school-leavers could spend four years at a foreign university […]
Soft rock was originally published on Emerging…
As bilateral aid retreats, the world’s development banks are reaching further than ever. Their critics worry that they have lost the plot. In London in mid-May 2025, at its first Annual Meeting in the city for nine years, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s governors granted recipient-country status to Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria. […]
Branching out was originally…
The Last Word: Leadership alignment, behaviour, and talent matter far more than whether employees are merely experimenting with AI tools. For the past two years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has largely been framed as a technology race: which firms are adopting fastest, which models are strongest, which countries are ahead, which jobs are vulnerable. […]
The courage to get AI…
Half of Europeans never use public transport. Freebies are an easy answer, but as some countries have found out, they don’t ease congestion. Eurostat published a transport snapshot in March showing that just over half of EU adults (50.6 per cent) did not use public transport at all in 2024. Only 10.7 per cent used […]
Off the buses was originally published on Emerging Europe.
Restrictions on the export of critical raw materials are surging. Producers may regret it, for they deliver revenue, briefly, but then what? Mathias Cormann opened the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul in April with a number that did most of the work for him. Highly restrictive measures (export […]
Rough trade was originally…