Emerging Europe

The Turkic world is not quite as united as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s talk of eternal brotherhood would suggest. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used the occasion of the opening of the 13th summit of the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS) in Ankara on October 30 to tell the various assembled leaders that there was “no room for separation, division or discord” in the Turkic world. It was a rather strange line given that there was a high profile absentee from the summit, namely Ilham Aliyev

Tariffs in the Western Balkans are low; the cost of everything else that happens at the border is not. When the World Bank published its spring Regular Economic Report on the Western Balkans in April, the mood was gloomy. The bank cut its 2026 growth forecast for the region’s six economies (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) from 3.1 per cent to 2.8 per cent, citing the conflict in the Middle East, persistent inflation and a generally uncertain o

Methodology this year favours reinvention: a response to the limits, increasingly visible, of traditional investment promotion practices. We have once again ranked the performance of 31 investment promotion agencies (IPAs) across Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Baltics, Caucasus, and Central Asia (the ninth time it has done so), and Estonia, a regular winner in the early years of the ranking, has returned to first place, dethroning Latvia, the highest ranked country of the past two y

The next wave of global growth is being shaped along an axis that runs between Asia and the Americas. Emerging Europe, the most growth-hungry part of the continent, should be among the first to ride it. For most of the post-war era, the global economy had one dominant axis: the Atlantic. Capital, technology, trade rules and security guarantees flowed between North America and Western Europe, and everyone else positioned themselves in relation to that relationship. Emerging Europe’s entire pos

The students who toppled Aleksandar Vučić inherit a stalled EU bid, a leaky budget and a sanctioned oil company. Unsurprisingly, a small army of right-wing influencers hastily imported from various parts of the world was not enough to convince Serbs that they should stick with Aleksandar Vučić, the country’s erstwhile president who resigned during the summer and called a snap parliamentary election in a bid to become prime minister. Instead, the election, held on October 25, was comprehensive

Georgia and Armenia outrank most of the EU’s East on economic freedom. Membership need not change that. On October 12 Ursula von der Leyen asked EU leaders to sign a “pact against gold-plating”, the habit of adding national requirements to European law. Central Europe has good reason to sign first. A Polish report has catalogued 100 examples of gold-plating and over-regulation in Poland’s implementation of EU law, and the Fraser Institute’s new index ranks Poland last of the 27 member states

Most of Central and Eastern Europe has shrugged off the Iran war’s energy shock, though Ukraine and Russia have not. The energy price shock triggered by the Iran war, and plenty of geopolitical turmoil besides, has done less damage to the economies of Central, East and Southeast Europe than might have been feared. That is the main finding of the autumn forecast published this week by the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw), which covers 23 countries in the region. The p

Just 23 per cent of CEE businesses have assessed water risks in their supply chains, exposing a major blind spot in corporate risk management. Water is becoming a costly business risk in Central and Eastern Europe. More than half (52 per cent) of companies surveyed have experienced at least one significant negative water-related impact in the past five years, including operational disruptions and rising costs. And the outlook offers little comfort: 58 per cent expect water risks to affect the

The next decade will test more than the wealth of entrepreneurial families. It will test whether they can reinvent what they built, raise successors capable of judgement, and keep the human core of their companies intact while machines take on more of the thinking. For fourteen centuries, one Japanese family built temples. Kongō Gumi was founded in Osaka in 578 and stayed under family control for roughly forty generations. It outlasted shoguns, civil wars, the Meiji Restoration and the destru

The pattern is simple. An anonymous source. Cheap reach. Fake accounts to make it look big. And whoever speaks first sets the story. This summer, a Ukrainian IT company called Fractal was attacked. Not by missiles, but by anonymous online channels. In two months, almost 110 stories about its co-founder, Artem Borodatiuk, appeared online. They reached close to three million views, the company says. The stories accused him of many things, from his role on a presidential business council to work

Europe’s AI funding has tripled, but mid-sized rounds have barely moved. Europe’s AI funding almost tripled in the first nine months of 2026, while investment rounds worth 25 million euros to 100 million euros barely changed. Tech.eu’s European AI funding data shows 18 rounds worth 25 million to 100 million euros in the first nine months of 2025, compared with 17 during the same period in 2026. I checked the underlying announcements and excluded transactions that could not be compared consist

Governments want to know where every tonne of steel and sack of coffee comes from, but their customs posts are still working out where to put the answer. On January 1 the European Union’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) stopped being a reporting exercise and started running up bills. Anyone importing more than 50 tonnes a year of steel, aluminium, cement, fertiliser, electricity or hydrogen now has to be an authorised declarant, with the emissions embedded in each shipment logged ag

EU member states increasingly recognise cybersecurity as an issue of economic resilience as well as national security. There is a common proverb that security always feels excessive, right up to the moment that it is the only thing that matters. Europe’s leaders should bear this in mind as the continent’s security environment is changing. The threat is no longer confined to tanks, missiles and aircraft crossing national borders. In addition to drone strikes, sabotage of critical infrastructur

The aim is not to make Central Europeans American. It is to remember what we once found so attractive about America. Thirty-five years ago, Central and Eastern Europe made one of the great strategic choices of the modern era. It chose the West. The revolutions of 1989 were revolutions of freedom. What followed went beyond democratisation and the shift from central planning to markets. In a broad cultural and economic sense, it was also an Americanisation. I use the word deliberately, and p

Poland’s new hub is good for all of Central Europe. Poland is building the largest transport project in its modern history, and the argument about it at home has narrowed to nine kilometres of track outside a city most foreign investors have never heard of. The argument matters well beyond Poland. It will decide whether Central Europe acquires logistics capacity of its own, for civilian and military use alike, or keeps renting it in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Ramstein. Start at a railway pla

Watching Germany talk itself into decline is a strange experience when you watch it from Central and Eastern Europe. For thirty years Germany has been our benchmark: the industrial model we plugged into, the Mittelstand we tried to copy, the institutional seriousness we often envied. Its supply chains run through Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and western Romania. When order books thin out in Stuttgart, factories in Timișoara and Žilina feel it within weeks. So when Europe’s largest econo

The agency’s latest report finds DDoS leads incident counts while ransomware stays most impactful in the short term. Distributed denial-of-service attacks made up just over half of the 8,257 incidents the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA analysed for 2025, but its newest threat report says the activity with the most impact came from elsewhere. Financially motivated attacks, ransomware above all, remained the most impactful threat to organisations in the short term, the European Union Agency f

Harnessing AI could improve productivity and help offset demographic pressures. Amid higher energy prices, heightened uncertainty, and weaker economic expansion in trading partners, growth in Europe and Central Asia is likely to slow to 2.2 per cent in 2026 from 2.6 per cent in 2025, according to the World Bank’s latest Europe and Central Asia Economic Update: Making AI Work: Jobs, Firms, and Productivity, released this week. The slowdown is broad-based, reflecting weakness in most countri

Romanian businesses are hurrying to put AI to work, while their customers (and their budgets) take a more leisurely approach. Romanians still pay for most things in cash. According to Elena Gheorghe of PayU, a payment processor, notes and coins account for around 55 to 60 per cent of payments in the country, only slightly down from roughly 65 per cent in previous years. Meanwhile the industry is already exploring “agentic commerce”, in which AI helps consumers search for products and takes pa

North Macedonia can accelerate growth and create more and better-paid jobs with the right reforms. A targeted set of reforms, focused on strengthening governance, unlocking the potential of private enterprise, and building the skills of workers, particularly young people, could help North Macedonia accelerate economic growth, create thousands of new jobs, and raise living standards for citizens, according to a new analysis by the World Bank Group. The North Macedonia Growth and Jobs Report