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To me, the most relevant quote is: > Subsidising IT adoption actually lowers southern productivity even further. Likewise, subsidising education has negative e

To me, the most relevant quote is: > Subsidising IT adoption actually lowers southern productivity even further. Likewise, subsidising education has negative effects, as it is effectively becomes a transfer to the north through high-skilled migration. These surprising results are due to the fact that, in our model, low IT adoption and low education are a symptom, rather than the cause, of low productivity growth in southern Europe. Indeed, given management efficiency, southern workers and firms behave optimally. There is no further room for improvement. As a citizen of a Southern EU country, this feels painfully true. Having worked a year in the Benelux, returning here just heightened that sense: the culture of hiding information, trading influence and promoting mediocrity. And I fear those EU funds for creating startups will just be consumed by the forces, being used by founders who have only known this reality. Working abroad beforehand should be, if not mandatory, at least strongly encouraged.

grenoire 7y ago
I think the north and the south both have a lot to learn from each other, unfortunately the economic discrepancies make it less and less likely for this exchange to happen. It's a sad state of affairs, but just as the southerners can learn a lot from the northerners, vice versa should definitely be encouraged as well.
ptr 7y ago
It's such a shame; having a work/management culture like in the northern Europe would make the south unstoppable -- it might even cause a north-to-south brain drain. I know I'd move, and the EU makes that easy.
galfarragem 7y ago
Being over-simplistic: Southern Europe lacks good management. Southern Europeans workers are wanted everywhere - they are productive when working in a different environment - so the problem must be extrinsic. It's very common that they are more educated than their bosses in their home country.
- ajsnigrutin 7y ago
  > they are productive when working in a different environment As someone from the balkans... it's not the enviroment that makes people productive (it can make them unproductive though), but the productive people choose to change their enviroment to one, where they can be more productive. And this is true for both plumbers and engineers. Just take a successfull good worker (and a bad one if you want), and put them into a shitty low-paying government job, where it takes three weeks to order a replacement computers mouse... shitty workers stay there ("i'm waiting for a mouse, can't work now, but i'm still getting paid") and good ones try to find a better oportunity elsewhere (and for shitty locations, that means far away, in a different country).
  - xondono 7y ago
    I've been on this situation (except it was not a government job), I use my own mouse, keyboard, and I've had to upgrade myself the hdd and RAM on the laptop provided to get any job done. BYOD is heavily frowned in Spain, but employers insist on giving me home-grade cheap laptops for CAD work. It's madness.
    - ajsnigrutin 7y ago
      Government jobs are really really bad at this. Small companies are a lot better at this (atleast here).. the last time i worked at an international one, they sent me an email two weeks before i started there, saying basically "we don't choose the devices, but we have a 5k(eur) budget for a work computer, and you pick everything yourself - we suggest two monitors and a 'real' (non laptop) keyboard and mouse + a docking station", I emailed them the list, and everything was waiting on my desk. There was also a policy of buying small stuff we needed ourselves and getting paid back (keyboard stopped working?, don't ask, just buy/order it, and sent the receipt to accounting to get reimbursed). And after two years, we were allowed to buy the written off equipment for 5-10eur/piece. It has a lot of potential for abuse, but in that setting it worked great.
      - xondono 7y ago
pjc50 7y ago
How on earth can this be changed, though? Culture is extremely resistant to being changed by fiat, and the governance and leadership of Italy isn't up to achieving a national transformation either.
- Inthenameofmine 7y ago
  My opinion isn't really scientific, but I think this has primarily to do with the demographic pyramid in Italy and most of Southern Europe, not much with economic development. Kosovo is a clear example that economic development isn't important for IT development and adoption, it's how much youth you have.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ciguy 7y ago
  I'm American but also an Italian citizen and have lived there for many years. I have zero hope that Italy will reform in the next few decades unless something incredibly radical like a war breaks out. Cultural apathy and corruption runs far too deep, and anyone who could reform simply leaves for Germany or the UK. Italy is a good place to live if you already have money. If you are a young enterprising person it's hell.
  - tim333 7y ago
    I rented a Fiat last week and the quality is way up from the old days. I gather the headquarters have moved to Holland. Maybe a bit of foreign control is the way forward. I think Lamborghinis are also now reliable since VW took over.
  - bitL 7y ago
    It's quite shocking to see that Italy and Spain will be overtaken in GDP PPP per capita by second-world countries like Czechia, Slovenia and Slovakia in the next ~5 years (all of them went through an economic collapse that set them 15 years back, followed by massive brain drain).
nikanj 7y ago
EU subsidies and funds can turn into a form of the resource curse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse ). When the biggest money is earned from writing grant applications, the best and the brightest are going to focus on that.
- kakoni 7y ago
  Why bother with writing, nowadays there are many grant-applications-as-a-service companies. "We provide a range of services, from defining your funding strategy to writing your funding proposal. " [1] [1] https://www.zazventures.com/ https://www.zazventures.com/
xondono 7y ago
As a someone working in hardware development (PCBs & firmware) in Spain, from the 5 companies I worked: - Only one used version control, the rest I had to introduce them (and fight management fears) to set it up. - Only two had onsite backup using RAID or similar - None had out-of-site backup - Only one had a system that supported shared libraries (for hardware), the rest resorted to email or a shared drive and a LOT of back & forth to ensure no one overwrote past edits. - I started working in 2010, yet I've managed to found "goto" statements (the "jump out of this function to some weird place in code" type) in the wild. But by far, the most damaging practice that I see around is how pointless much of the work done is. Given the amount of investment required for developing your own hardware, knowing that less than 40% of the products I have worked on are on the market because they were pointless in the first place (and everyone knew it) is the most demoralizing. EDIT: I always forget to double the break lines
- raverbashing 7y ago
  > yet I've managed to found "goto" statements (the "jump out of this function to some weird place in code" type) in the wild. I might just add that this is not wrong and actually expected in some places. Linux uses it. It helps with some error handling situations. But yeah with the other points I agree.
  - golergka 7y ago
    While I've seen a few places where goto made sense (as in, "goto fail" in C), a goto that lead somewhere out of a function has never been one of them.
  - xondono 7y ago
    That’s what I’ve added the parens, I know there’s some very limited edge cases were it makes sense to tradeoff clarity for speed and use a goto. To clarify, I’m talking about stuff that could be easily done with functions or loops being done by random goto statements.
  - uxp100 7y ago
    to further nitpick and distract from the main conversation, it sounds like they are talking about non-local goto (setjmp etc in c), which, just like an actual goto statement, is useful for error handling, but is much more difficult to deal with that a normal goto.
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Having some experience of living in one of those Southern countries, IMO consumer/infrastructure/gov IT is at least as good as the UK's. Broadband is patchy, but where it exists it's often faster than the products available in the UK, and service call-out times are better. (I've had next-day engineer visits after reporting an outage, which would be unheard of in the UK.) Major and minor services all have apps and web sites, and online shopping is very much a thing. There's also a single unified government-administered ID system that works with the major government portals, banks, and some other services. Small biz sites are some way behind, but design agencies are growing at a healthy pace in the major cities. There isn't much of a startup culture in the Bay Area sense, but that probably has more to do with lack of a strong investment culture than lack of talent or ability. So I'm certainly not seeing evidence of "low IT adoption" or generally poor performance. I'm not even seeing unusual evidence of corruption, nepotism, or incompetence. They certainly exist, but not at the scale the UK is currently experiencing.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Where is online shopping very much a thing? Eurostat reports the following percentages for the question "Have you purchased something online in 2018": Greece: 36%, Italy: 36%, Spain: 53%, Portugal: 37%. For comparison, the UK is at 83% and the EU average is 60%. In any case, my experience with consumer or government IT isn't bad either. And I don't disagree there's talent and ability - unfortunately, half of it leaves, and the other half is squandered. My beef is with poor management, not lack of talented people. And unfortunately here I can't say there is lack of corruption and nepotism either, but I acknowledge different Southern countries are different.

grenoire 7y ago

I think the north and the south both have a lot to learn from each other, unfortunately the economic discrepancies make it less and less likely for this exchange to happen. It's a sad state of affairs, but just as the southerners can learn a lot from the northerners, vice versa should definitely be encouraged as well.

ptr 7y ago

It's such a shame; having a work/management culture like in the northern Europe would make the south unstoppable -- it might even cause a north-to-south brain drain. I know I'd move, and the EU makes that easy.

galfarragem 7y ago

Being over-simplistic: Southern Europe lacks good management. Southern Europeans workers are wanted everywhere - they are productive when working in a different environment - so the problem must be extrinsic. It's very common that they are more educated than their bosses in their home country.

ajsnigrutin 7y ago
> they are productive when working in a different environment As someone from the balkans... it's not the enviroment that makes people productive (it can make them unproductive though), but the productive people choose to change their enviroment to one, where they can be more productive. And this is true for both plumbers and engineers. Just take a successfull good worker (and a bad one if you want), and put them into a shitty low-paying government job, where it takes three weeks to order a replacement computers mouse... shitty workers stay there ("i'm waiting for a mouse, can't work now, but i'm still getting paid") and good ones try to find a better oportunity elsewhere (and for shitty locations, that means far away, in a different country).
- xondono 7y ago
  I've been on this situation (except it was not a government job), I use my own mouse, keyboard, and I've had to upgrade myself the hdd and RAM on the laptop provided to get any job done. BYOD is heavily frowned in Spain, but employers insist on giving me home-grade cheap laptops for CAD work. It's madness.
  - ajsnigrutin 7y ago
    Government jobs are really really bad at this. Small companies are a lot better at this (atleast here).. the last time i worked at an international one, they sent me an email two weeks before i started there, saying basically "we don't choose the devices, but we have a 5k(eur) budget for a work computer, and you pick everything yourself - we suggest two monitors and a 'real' (non laptop) keyboard and mouse + a docking station", I emailed them the list, and everything was waiting on my desk. There was also a policy of buying small stuff we needed ourselves and getting paid back (keyboard stopped working?, don't ask, just buy/order it, and sent the receipt to accounting to get reimbursed). And after two years, we were allowed to buy the written off equipment for 5-10eur/piece. It has a lot of potential for abuse, but in that setting it worked great.
    - xondono 7y ago

pjc50 7y ago

How on earth can this be changed, though? Culture is extremely resistant to being changed by fiat, and the governance and leadership of Italy isn't up to achieving a national transformation either.

Inthenameofmine 7y ago
My opinion isn't really scientific, but I think this has primarily to do with the demographic pyramid in Italy and most of Southern Europe, not much with economic development. Kosovo is a clear example that economic development isn't important for IT development and adoption, it's how much youth you have.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ciguy 7y ago
I'm American but also an Italian citizen and have lived there for many years. I have zero hope that Italy will reform in the next few decades unless something incredibly radical like a war breaks out. Cultural apathy and corruption runs far too deep, and anyone who could reform simply leaves for Germany or the UK. Italy is a good place to live if you already have money. If you are a young enterprising person it's hell.
- tim333 7y ago
  I rented a Fiat last week and the quality is way up from the old days. I gather the headquarters have moved to Holland. Maybe a bit of foreign control is the way forward. I think Lamborghinis are also now reliable since VW took over.
- bitL 7y ago
  It's quite shocking to see that Italy and Spain will be overtaken in GDP PPP per capita by second-world countries like Czechia, Slovenia and Slovakia in the next ~5 years (all of them went through an economic collapse that set them 15 years back, followed by massive brain drain).

nikanj 7y ago

EU subsidies and funds can turn into a form of the resource curse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse ). When the biggest money is earned from writing grant applications, the best and the brightest are going to focus on that.

kakoni 7y ago
Why bother with writing, nowadays there are many grant-applications-as-a-service companies. "We provide a range of services, from defining your funding strategy to writing your funding proposal. " [1] [1] https://www.zazventures.com/ https://www.zazventures.com/

xondono 7y ago

As a someone working in hardware development (PCBs & firmware) in Spain, from the 5 companies I worked: - Only one used version control, the rest I had to introduce them (and fight management fears) to set it up. - Only two had onsite backup using RAID or similar - None had out-of-site backup - Only one had a system that supported shared libraries (for hardware), the rest resorted to email or a shared drive and a LOT of back & forth to ensure no one overwrote past edits. - I started working in 2010, yet I've managed to found "goto" statements (the "jump out of this function to some weird place in code" type) in the wild. But by far, the most damaging practice that I see around is how pointless much of the work done is. Given the amount of investment required for developing your own hardware, knowing that less than 40% of the products I have worked on are on the market because they were pointless in the first place (and everyone knew it) is the most demoralizing. EDIT: I always forget to double the break lines

raverbashing 7y ago
> yet I've managed to found "goto" statements (the "jump out of this function to some weird place in code" type) in the wild. I might just add that this is not wrong and actually expected in some places. Linux uses it. It helps with some error handling situations. But yeah with the other points I agree.
- golergka 7y ago
  While I've seen a few places where goto made sense (as in, "goto fail" in C), a goto that lead somewhere out of a function has never been one of them.
- xondono 7y ago
  That’s what I’ve added the parens, I know there’s some very limited edge cases were it makes sense to tradeoff clarity for speed and use a goto. To clarify, I’m talking about stuff that could be easily done with functions or loops being done by random goto statements.
- uxp100 7y ago
  to further nitpick and distract from the main conversation, it sounds like they are talking about non-local goto (setjmp etc in c), which, just like an actual goto statement, is useful for error handling, but is much more difficult to deal with that a normal goto.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

Having some experience of living in one of those Southern countries, IMO consumer/infrastructure/gov IT is at least as good as the UK's. Broadband is patchy, but where it exists it's often faster than the products available in the UK, and service call-out times are better. (I've had next-day engineer visits after reporting an outage, which would be unheard of in the UK.) Major and minor services all have apps and web sites, and online shopping is very much a thing. There's also a single unified government-administered ID system that works with the major government portals, banks, and some other services. Small biz sites are some way behind, but design agencies are growing at a healthy pace in the major cities. There isn't much of a startup culture in the Bay Area sense, but that probably has more to do with lack of a strong investment culture than lack of talent or ability. So I'm certainly not seeing evidence of "low IT adoption" or generally poor performance. I'm not even seeing unusual evidence of corruption, nepotism, or incompetence. They certainly exist, but not at the scale the UK is currently experiencing.

icebraining 7y ago
Where is online shopping very much a thing? Eurostat reports the following percentages for the question "Have you purchased something online in 2018": Greece: 36%, Italy: 36%, Spain: 53%, Portugal: 37%. For comparison, the UK is at 83% and the EU average is 60%. In any case, my experience with consumer or government IT isn't bad either. And I don't disagree there's talent and ability - unfortunately, half of it leaves, and the other half is squandered. My beef is with poor management, not lack of talented people. And unfortunately here I can't say there is lack of corruption and nepotism either, but I acknowledge different Southern countries are different.