| It's not profitable because movement of skilled labor is free across whole EU. If you've poor countries in EU then a company from rich EU country can easily buy large farmland or ship out dirty/sketchy industries (waste recycling companies who just set waste on fire) to poor countries. This way you can keep pollution away from your shores while buying the beneficail resources (like farmland) at cheap. Resources go where money is. Now, resources can be either agriculture lands or skilled labor. If you expand the market by adding lots of poor countries to your free trade alliance, you'll notice that the rich countries get way more richer at faster rate than poor countries. Think about an EU where every country is equally rich and has equally wealthy population. Then buying large farmland in Romania will be cost as much as in Germany and what happens next? Romanian companies might also end up owning large lands in Germany. How is that beneficial for rich members of EU to make poor ones richer? You end up losing country over your country's resources to foreign power. China knows this and that's why they invest in poor countries to create a bigger market on favourable trade terms. Now, these terms don't even need to biased in favour of China if China deals with poor countries as the naturally China being richer will benefit from the effect outlined above. So China doesn't need to be unfair to win and become rich while extracting resources from poor countries they invest in. Is it good, bad or evil? Depends on how you think about other players like Sacadinavia and Western Europe. I don't know why we should treat China any different if I am a poor European country. |