5 ms·

Interested to see that the top ten shrinking countries on Earth are all in East Europe. Any Eastern Europeans here that can attest to the impact of this?

mantas 8y ago
Open borders to Western Europe. Mass migration for the better wage. Basically selling our productive (both in term of jobs and kids) people for euromoneys. Impact is our older generation is fucked because they won't get reasonable pensions. Businesses are having hard time to find people for local wages. Hard to compete on price to western europe when it's right next door. Inflation is crazy to catch up with Western salaries and pricing. Yet we don't have manufacturing and R&D base to compete on all but price. It's slowly coming up (e.g. software is doing great), but prices/wages are raising quicker than that. Hopefully we'll squeeze through to have enough to compete on by the time we're no longer price competitive. TL;DR: fun times
- jotm 8y ago
  Haha, downvoted because no one in the West gives a flying fuck about people leaving developing countries and the impact on those economies. They do care about dem too many immigrants though. It's puzzling.
  - mantas 8y ago
    West cares about individuals, not about communities or nations or states. You see crying baby - you help. You see someone hardly making a living - you invite them and pay more. Who gives a fuck about how it affects the whole society.
    - jotm 8y ago
      Honestly I don't even know why you're downvoted. It's not me, so... On the other hand, I haven't been banned yet, hmm...
      - sctb 8y ago
        Please stop and post civilly and substantively instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nadiasotnikova 8y ago
I'm from Belarus. There's lots of propaganda around having more children. Our president regularly says that women should stop having careers and start making more children. Lots of people are leaving Belarus, but since we're not in EU and it's not as easy to leave, I don't think it's the main factor. Education levels are very high in Belarus. Check out these stats. https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/belarus_statistics.html https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/belarus_statistics.html Literacy rates are close to 100% and majority of women get higher education. Belarus has a very poor economy and low salaries (families can't afford to have more than 1 child). And finally, a lot of people are dying. Alcoholism issues are pretty big, a lot of men die young for example. Women would have to have looots of babies to offset the mortality rate. It's probably a combination of all of these factors and more.
- AdamM12 8y ago
  > Alcoholism issues are pretty big, a lot of men die young for example. Not surprising given this is happening also in the states in non college educated males.
iguy 8y ago
Perhaps of interest, an assessment of Hungary's attempts to reverse this: https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-induced-baby-boom https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-...
Chyzwar 8y ago
Impact Bad: - More conservative/populist governments - Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Russia. These governments usually increase spending to buy voters. - The retirement systems is a massive ticking bomb. Next economic crisis will bring some Greek moments again but in central Europe. - Less competitive, smaller cities have a hard time to retain young people. Cities with less than 100k people are slowly collapsing.

mantas 8y ago

Open borders to Western Europe. Mass migration for the better wage. Basically selling our productive (both in term of jobs and kids) people for euromoneys. Impact is our older generation is fucked because they won't get reasonable pensions. Businesses are having hard time to find people for local wages. Hard to compete on price to western europe when it's right next door. Inflation is crazy to catch up with Western salaries and pricing. Yet we don't have manufacturing and R&D base to compete on all but price. It's slowly coming up (e.g. software is doing great), but prices/wages are raising quicker than that. Hopefully we'll squeeze through to have enough to compete on by the time we're no longer price competitive. TL;DR: fun times

jotm 8y ago
Haha, downvoted because no one in the West gives a flying fuck about people leaving developing countries and the impact on those economies. They do care about dem too many immigrants though. It's puzzling.
- mantas 8y ago
  West cares about individuals, not about communities or nations or states. You see crying baby - you help. You see someone hardly making a living - you invite them and pay more. Who gives a fuck about how it affects the whole society.
  - jotm 8y ago
    Honestly I don't even know why you're downvoted. It's not me, so... On the other hand, I haven't been banned yet, hmm...
    - sctb 8y ago
      Please stop and post civilly and substantively instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

nadiasotnikova 8y ago

I'm from Belarus. There's lots of propaganda around having more children. Our president regularly says that women should stop having careers and start making more children. Lots of people are leaving Belarus, but since we're not in EU and it's not as easy to leave, I don't think it's the main factor. Education levels are very high in Belarus. Check out these stats. https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/belarus_statistics.html https://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/belarus_statistics.html Literacy rates are close to 100% and majority of women get higher education. Belarus has a very poor economy and low salaries (families can't afford to have more than 1 child). And finally, a lot of people are dying. Alcoholism issues are pretty big, a lot of men die young for example. Women would have to have looots of babies to offset the mortality rate. It's probably a combination of all of these factors and more.

AdamM12 8y ago
> Alcoholism issues are pretty big, a lot of men die young for example. Not surprising given this is happening also in the states in non college educated males.

iguy 8y ago

Perhaps of interest, an assessment of Hungary's attempts to reverse this: https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-induced-baby-boom https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-...

Chyzwar 8y ago

Impact Bad: - More conservative/populist governments - Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Russia. These governments usually increase spending to buy voters. - The retirement systems is a massive ticking bomb. Next economic crisis will bring some Greek moments again but in central Europe. - Less competitive, smaller cities have a hard time to retain young people. Cities with less than 100k people are slowly collapsing.