Carter Francis - Foreign direct investment and regional development in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union : a collection of essays in memory of Professor Francis ’Frank’ Carter

This book is a judicious mix of the planned and the spontaneous. As any observer of the transition states of ECE and FSU will appreciate the last decade has produced massive transformations and it is now difficult to recall the days when the old communist bloc having opted out of globalisation by design was peddling a distinctive brand of autarky which was as idiosyncratic for its economic management and location policy as it was in its ambivalent approach to human rights and democracy. But Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the unreformable and, as they say, the rest is history. While there is nostalgia for the old system, opening-up to the world has brought massive changes especially evident in the high streets and suburban fringes of the larger towns and also on the roads where the number of vehicles has increased considerably and Western makes are now much more prominent. In Hungary where the number of cars has increased from 1.95mln in 1990 to 2.63mln, the ratio 12.8 vehicles of manufactured in communist countries Dacias, Ladas, Polski Fiats, kodas, Trabants, Wartburgs and Zastavas for every Western car has switched to 1.9 Western cars (23 different makes) for every one surviving from the communist past. The change has been even more striking for lorries and vans where numbers have increased in Hungary from 224 to 369th but with the ratio transformed from 132:1 in favour Eastern makes (dominated by the East German IFA) to 6.4:1 in favour of Western makes led by Volkswagen, Mercedes and IVECO.

These changes owe much to foreign capital since domestic private enterprise has made a comparatively slow start and is additionally inconspicuous through the takeover of former state enterprises with limited impact on the landscape with relatively few greenfield projects. Foreign capital has been more prominent in this sense and the impact reflects a revised locational agenda. Governments have opened their economies to global competition and have come to accept foreign investment as a fact of life, though not without a measure of political soul-searching after the polemics of the communist era when it seemed preferable to do without new resources rarther than share them with external capital. And there is still a lingering insensitivity over the damage that can arise from unstable fiscal environments: at the time of writing, car manufacturing by Volkswagen in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Hercegovina) is threatened by disagreement over customs-free import of disassembled vehicles between the Trade Ministry and the Federations Customs Department. The key importance of foreign investment is brought out in all general geographical studies of the region and seemed a likely candidate for a full-length study in its own right. However the untimely death of Frank Carter, who made such an indelible impression on the geographical landscape of what we now call East Central Europe, effectively promoted a latent project into one with greater immediacy and also endowed it with the blessing of authors drawn from several overlapping research networks. As one of Franks old associates privy to works that might have been it has been a privilege to canvass support which has found a universally positive response. Indeed, the only disappointment has arisen from the passing of Ian Hamilton, one Franks former colleagues at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and a major contributor to the literature as the following reading list demonstrates. However every good literary idea needs a publisher and we have been fortunate to have the support of Ashgate who have welcomed the book to help launch a series of books on Economic Geography.

So this is a memorial volume but one with a clear theme which we hope will increase its relevance to the present generation of students of transition which continues to claim its own domain within our global world. We have tried to deal with the broad concepts and themes which apply throughout the region once subject to Soviet-inspired communism and the early essays also explore the variations at national level with the aid of United Nations statistics. Then in a second section there is a focus on the national scale with reference to specific themes where it is can be shown how foreign investment or the lack of it has relevance for the prospects of ordinary people. In view of the difficulty of collating all the various national breakdowns on a comparable basis, we have not managed to produce a map of foreign investment by regions and cities across the whole study area a much-needed guide for students and policy-makers but it is clear that investment is spatially uneven and this has clear implications which can be seen in migration: including substantial movement into Western Europe, where concern is arising over the consequences of EU enlargement that is an immediate prospeect as these words are written. Regional policy is still in its infancy but more must be done to entice investors beyond the handfull of capital and provincial cities that have been relatively privileged to date. However, the modest progress that the book hopefully represents would not have been possible without the support of all the authors who have managed to deliver according to a tight schedule. My wife Marion has made a massive contribution and coped with a steep learning curve to cope with the mysteries of camera-ready copy and East European diacriticals. And we have had generous support from Carolyn Court, Amanda Richardson and Valerie Rose at Ashgate.

We have tried to be consistent in our use of jargon and I would draw attention to the rather lengthy list of abbreviations which are used throughout the book. We have stuck to short country names including the use of Macedonia rather that the more unwieldy Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (adopted officially to allay Greek sensitivities) with the one exception of Czech Republic where we follow the near-universal disinclination to use to simpler form of Czechia. Serbia and Montenegro is used retrospectively for the whole period of the former Yugoslavias demise while Bosnia and Hercegovina (the English rather than the official spelling) may be abbreviated BiH. We also use East Central Europe (ECE) . The project was initially conceived with an East Central European thrust and although the FSU is included to allow the discourse to consider transition states more widely, the single country studies maintain the original focus.