Will the Central Eastern European and Russian economic boom last for a generation? - August 2007

Throughout the 1990s Central Europeans had to put up with ignorant foreigners making jokes about queues and shortages, though free market economic reforms at the beginning of the decade had eliminated most queues almost overnight. Jokes about shortages weren’t funny1, but they were a consequence of the widespread knowledge in the west that decades of non-market communist rule caused frequent shortages because prices were set too low and producers did not have incentives to increase production.
Now in 2007 the queues are back. But this time it is completely different. The queues these days are of businesses and consumers with real money to spend.
For Hanel, a world leader in automated storage and retrieval technology, some markets in Central Europe are now larger than their traditional markets in Western Europe. Waiting lists for deliver stretch up to several months, partly as a result of the strong growth in this region.