The Last Word: Companies must change to stay relevant.
For years, Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland and Romania have occupied a flattering place in Europe’s economic imagination: diligent improvers, able manufacturers, reliable beneficiaries of integration. It is not a false story—over the past two decades, these economies have narrowed the income gap with Western Europe through rising productivity, foreign investment, infrastructure spending and deep participation in European value chains. But successful stories often outlive the conditions that made them true.
That is why the World Bank’s latest assessment deserves attention, and a degree of challenge. Its diagnosis is useful. It points to weak managerial capabilities, slow digital diffusion, underinvestment in intangible assets, financing systems that do too little for innovation and patchy policy coordination. All of that is real.
But the report still frames these shortcomings largely as gaps to be closed, as though a better mix of skills, support and technology uptake might be enough. That feels too gentle. The deeper problem is not that too few firms have adopted the right tools. It is that too many are still organised for an older era.
Read Andrew Wrobel’s full Last Word column at Reinvantage.
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