Europe--Still Holding On

Europe and the United States still act as the twin turbines of the global economy, accounting for 60 percent of all trade and investment flows.

Americans invested five times as much money in Germany last year as they did in China, and U.S. firms in total have poured four times as much money into tiny Belgium as they have into India. Europe provides three-quarters of all foreign investment in the United States, creating millions of American jobs.

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The recent elections of Merkel in Germany and Sarkozy in France suggests that Europeans are not ready to give up on themselves completely--not yet. Although tax rates and unemployment rates may be higher on the East side of the Atlantic, Europe still draws breath. Though native European birthrates are below replacement, suggesting a future with insufficient workers and tax revenues to prop up ever more cash-starved welfare mandates, Europeans may be beginning to wake up from a drugged sleep. Though European capital cities are filling with uneducated, untrained, violence-minded and primitive religious immigrants with no love for Europe or her values, Europe's faint vital signs may be starting to strengthen. Perhaps.

Still, Germany, Scotland, France, and other countries are losing some of their best educated professionals to more vibrant countries that offer better opportunities for achievement and advancement.

Figures released by Germany's Federal Statistics Office showed that the number of Germans emigrating rose to 155,290 last year - the highest number since the country's reunification in 1990 - which equalled levels last experienced in the 1940s during the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War.

...OECD figures show that Germany is near the top of a league of industrial nations experiencing a brain drain which for the first time since the 1950s now exceeds the number of immigrants.

Stephanie Wahl, of the Institute for Economics, based in Bonn, said that those who are leaving Germany are mostly highly motivated and well educated.

....Fed up with comparatively poor job prospects at home - where unemployment is as high as 17 per cent in some regions - as well as high taxes and bureaucracy, thousands of Germans have upped sticks for Austria and Switzerland, or emigrated to the United States.

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The Netherlands and other Northern European countries are experiencing similar troubles.

There is clearly a marked difference in outlook between Europeans looking for an opportunity to succeed and excel, and those who are just looking to be taken care of by the nanny state. Certainly at this time of declining birth rates, climbing social welfare expenses, and threats to the homeland from primitive religious immigrant bigots, Europe cannot afford to lose her best and brightest.

Interestingly, a parallel brain drain is benefiting Western Europe, at the expense of Eastern Europe, Africa, Southern and East Asia, and the former USSR.

Nations with lower tax rates and higher opportunity levels tend to reap the benefit of the brain drains.