Paul from Paris

European Consumer Day 2010 fell on March 15. Did you notice?

The EESC –that’s the European Economic and Social Committee, “a bridge between Europe and organised civil society”– marked the day with an event, held in Madrid, on enforcement of consumers’ rights.

A few days later, in Brussels, the European Union hosted a two-day European Consumer Summit.

This week, the European Commission released the third edition of the Consumer Markets Scoreboard, which benchmarks and tracks national consumer behaviors and the realization of the common market.

As reported in yesterday’s Financial Times, the European Commission has decided to reconsider an initiative to make it easier for consumers to claim damages for losses suffered from anti-competitive conduct. The initiative will not become law any time soon; the Commission will instead renew consultations with stakeholders.

John Dalli, the freshly seated European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy from Malta, duly notes consumer frustration with retail banking, electric utilities, and rental cars. For good order’s sake, Dalli also talks about “urban transport” and “green energy”. At the top of Dalli’s agenda is something he calls “Web 3.0″, which seems to be crossborder sales done over the Internet.

All of this matters to consumers, but none of it is compelling. Mr. Dalli lacks conviction, political will, or legislative ambition today. An advocate for neither consumers nor business, the Commissioner seems content to preside over a formidable institutional machine left to idle. The lost opportunity is colossal.

Given the fondness or chauvinism French speakers can have for their language, the news comes as a surprise: there is a shortage of interpreters capable of translating to French.

The shortage affects the Council of Europe, the European Union, and the United Nations.

In an effort to reverse this trend, the UN entered into an agreement this week with the two main translation schools in France, ESIT and ISIT. The UN’s aim is to have a steady stream of well-trained candidates for its recruitment exams.

These are the questions that puzzle me:

• I’d think the foreign-language performance of native French speakers continues to improve: among 20-somethings, more French people are English-speaking or German-speaking or Spanish-speaking than among 40-somethings or 60-somethings. My anecdotal impression is that there are more of these people in France, and that their average performance level is climbing.
• Preferences may be changing. Being an interpreter at an international organization may be thought less desirable today than it once was. Maybe other professional opportunities have developed that seem more desirable to those who would otherwise have become interpreters.
• The path to becoming an interpreter at the UN, EU, or Council of Europe may be seen as overly burdensome. From remarks made by the UN, ISIT, and ESIT, preparation for the UN exam requires particular time and effort. Particularly if successful recruitment at an international organization is difficult for a candidate to ascertain, other professional opportunities may be preferable to candidates.

Early in 1994, I saw a manager, an IT consultant, arrive at a meeting. I noticed this because he was late. I remember it because he came into the meeting with a bunch of European newspapers. At the time, I saw this as an encouraging sign for European integration and European journalism, an alternative to the corraling of news behind paywalls erected by Lexis/Nexis, West, Bloomberg, and other services.

I thought back to this anecdote while reading a thoughtful and data-rich report from the Pew Research Center on how people (American people, in this case) get news. Most Americans say they follow the news most or all of the time, generally with several news sources: television, online, radio, newspaper.

I suspect that Europeans seek out and consume news like Americans. But I’m disappointed that the offer of European news hasn’t kept pace with technological change.

As in 1994, a Paris resident like me can buy daily papers, at a neighborhood newsstand, from France, the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The biggest changes are an increase in price, and the inroads made by papers with a European scope, such as The Wall Street Journal (Europe) and The Financial Times.

Most European papers have web sites that feature daily newspaper content, and I can access these pages easily, without paywalls. This is a positive change, but I regret two things:

• many papers seem to offer watered-down versions of their print editions, whereas I seek out strong or clearly expressed editorial voices;
• as with print newspapers, it remains difficult to access news from European countries with small populations and distinct languages: Finland, Lithuania, Bulgaria (Cyrillic alphabet), Greece (Greek alphabet).

Radio and television news from European neighbors is as difficult to access in 2010 as it was in 1994. Cable networks seem to favor exotic fare, especially from the Middle East or North Africa, at the expense of leading stations from European neighbors. And radio seems paralyzed by an unwillingness either to use the Internet or to let people abroad know about Internet radio streams.

French students are traveling in ever greater numbers to pursue their education in Cluj, the historic capital of Transylvania, in Romania.

What attracts them to Romania?

Medical school.

Why?

Medical school in France is especially selective, but in an odd way. Studies begin immediately after secondary school, and are open to basically all high school graduates. But, at the end of the first year, all students sit for a comprehensive examination. Of those who take the exam, 85% fail. After two attempts, candidates are not allowed to re-sit the exam. Historically, France limits medical school graduates to a grand total of 7,500 per year.

Many are called; few are chosen. And now, opportunity knocks.

Romania is now a European Union member state. Degrees granted by its schools and universities are entitled to recognition by French authorities.

French students, either sore from failure after a year’s study or eager to find an alternative that offers odds better than 3 in 20, are prepared to travel and to pay for a medical education elsewhere.

Romanian medical schools, such as the one in Cluj, acted on this demand. They offer classes in Romanian, but also in English, French, and Hungarian (because a significant Hungarian-speaking minority lives in the region) for the first three years of medical school. Starting in the fourth year, knowledge of Romanian is required, because of patient contact. Medical school lasts six years.

For Romanian schools, foreign enrollment generates extra revenues. Tuition fees vary, but are in the neighborhood of €3,000 to €5,000 per year. In addition to French students, Romanian schools are attractive to Swedes and North Africans.

No one claims that the Romanian schools are diploma mills. Foreign students have to pass entrance exams or be accepted on the basis of an application file.

What impact will this have on French medical education? It’s too early to tell.

For many years, French nursing schools had extremely selective end-year examinations, prompting French nursing students to study in neighboring Belgium. Then Belgium adopted class-size limits or quotas, like France. Selective exit exams appeared in Belgium, removing what had made its nursing schools attractive. The status quo ante returned in France.

Romanian has been an EU member only since 2007. The number of French students who completed medical school in Romania with an intent to practice later in France remains small, although it will soon snowball.

When do young people move out of the parental home to establish an independent household?

The answer to this questions turns out to vary considerably throughout Europe, according to a study by Eurostat, the European statistical office.

The Eurostat study considered “youth”, defined as persons aged 15 to 29; there are 96 million such people in the EU.

Looking at this population, the study didn’t provide an average age at which youth set up an independent household. This having been said, the study did offer insights that are more intriguing than a raw number:

• Women move out of the parental home at a younger age then men, in all European countries;
• The median age at which women set up an independent household varies among European countries;
• The amplitude of the range at which women set up an independent household also varies among European countries; and
• The extent to which men and women behave differently –in other words, the relative difference of the age at which men and women set up an independent household– likewise varies among European countries.

Eurostat, Youth in Europe (2009), Figure 2-2

Apart from the question of establishing an independent household, the Eurostat study considered other demographic and economic issues. The one that caught my eye was the age at which women bear their first child. Throughout the EU, this age increased during the period 1995-2005, in some countries by as much as three years.