Southeast Europe Data

Before any organisation can work in four days what it previously did in five, it needs to answer a question that most companies have never seriously asked: Where does the time actually go? The four-day working week is no longer a fringe idea. Pilots across the United Kingdom, Iceland, Germany, and Portugal have produced results The four-day week won’t work without better time intelligence was originally published on Emerging Europe.

Britain promised to ban unpaid internships and has just thought better of it. The evidence says free labour buys almost no advantage at all. Jonathan Reynolds, then Britain’s business secretary, launched a call for evidence on unpaid internships in July 2025, asking how firms used the placements to size up candidates. It closed in October. No pay, no gain was originally published on Emerging Europe.

A viral video from Paris this week revived the case against tethered caps. The evidence that might settle the argument arrives in July 2027. Volodymyr Zelensky reached for a bottle of water in Paris on July 14, twisted the cap, and kept twisting until it came away in his hand. He set it down on Screw it was originally published on Emerging Europe.

Brussels is spending billions to route Asian trade around Russia and a war-torn Iran. Much of the cargo still takes the Russian road anyway. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev landed in Brussels on June 23, met Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa, and watched the European Commission launch its Connectivity Agenda Platform. Jozef Síkela, the Bridge over troubled water was originally published on Emerging Europe.

Fewer Europeans are eating out and margins are thin. Their way back runs through theatre, delivery and a smaller, cheaper table than before. Guido Zöllick got his tax cut on the first day of January. The president of DEHOGA, Germany’s hotel and restaurant federation, had lobbied for years, and the government finally lowered value-added tax Second helpings was originally published on Emerging Europe.

Dubai might dig a new port to skirt the Strait of Hormuz. Too soon, say the sceptics; but how soon is now, when the payoff lands decades on? When Dubai’s Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum informed his advisers in the mid-1970s that he intended to carve a deep-water port out of the salt flats These things take time was originally published on Emerging Europe.

Warsaw is buying more gold than any central bank on earth, through every price dip. The reasoning holds; copying it is harder than it looks. Adam Glapiński was in a buying mood. On July 9 the governor of the National Bank of Poland (NBP) told reporters that his bank had picked up 82 tonnes of Poland’s golden rule was originally published on Emerging Europe.

The Last Word: Creativity is not the ability to summon ideas out of nowhere, but to recognise a real possibility before it becomes obvious. We tend to imagine creativity as an act of production: a blank page is filled, a concept appears on a whiteboard. Or someone in a meeting says something that nobody else Creativity is not producing ideas. It is noticing them was originally published on Emerging Europe.

New UNFPA data suggests young people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have not given up on children, but life keeps getting in the way. Young people across Eastern Europe and Central Asia are not turning their backs on family life. They are simply running out of road to get there. That is the central Between aspiration and reality was originally published on Emerging Europe.

Europe’s investors say the companies are ready and the capital is not. Europe has the companies. What it still lacks, investors gathered in Tallinn said in May, is homegrown capital willing to fund them at scale. That assessment came from the limited partners and fund managers who met at the LP-GP Meetup, an invitation-only gathering European investors see a strong pipeline and a capital gap at home was originally published on Emerging Europe.