New markets

It is a wide perception among Europeans that Western countries  can only lose from East Asia's success in terms of growth and employment. Development in one part of the world may require lower growth in another and Europeans are worried about competition from developing countries, such as China, India and Brazil. But what are they worried about? Since 2007 German, British and Dutch export to China and India has risen steadly. German car makers and chemical companies are focused on what is going on in East Asia economies. The expansion of educational products and services has become a good opportunity for UK.
At the same time, other developing countries, such as Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey, may soon show an extraordinary growth in demand for consumer products because people, who live in those parts ot the world, may desire the same consumer goods that we all desire in Western countries. Of course, a change is always demanding, especially for those workers with narrow or manual skill. That's why most experts estimate that 2 billion people are going to be brought into the global middle class as some of the most challenging parts of East Asia and South America economies develop. Consequently, 4.9 billion people are predicted to be middle class in the world by 2030. As Jim O'Neal wrote in 2012, since a couple of years we have been seeing  Indians paying prices to go up in ski lifts in Switzerland in the summer, Chinese traders offering rewards to native Parisians to buy them Louis Vuitton bags and Tibetan street traders walking across high mountain ranges in the Himalayas using mobile telephones. 

On the other hand, some European peripheral countries situated on the edge of Mediterranean sea have been seeing their unemployment rate rising sharply since 2008. For instance, Italy's unemployment rate has risen at 12.5 % and this obviously means that Italian policy-makers have made something wrong from a political point of view. They are still predicting disaster, quite routinely, in order to justify the distruction of social security and other popular programs. At the same time, companies investing in Italy, Greece and Spain have been becoming entangled in bureaucracy, poorly drafted regulation and corruption cases. Ambiguous tax laws for investors exacerbate the challenge.
Morevover, as it is known, the current economic crisis has led many South European companies to lay off some of their employees. This explains partly why direct investments in South Europe countries have been weaker than in those parts of the world above mentioned. If South Europe coutries had a friendlier environment for investors, employment (and investment) would grow gradually.
It's much better to be open-minded and think more globally. 

(photos used with cc permission from Stefano, http://cavnero.blogspot.it/ )