business
White Russia
Makes Progress
By Jon Basil Utley
B
elarus is an interesting,
attractive
country, certainly
off the beaten track.
A beautiful, rebuilt
capital city of Minsk
(mostly
destroyed
along with 30 percent of the country’s population during World War
II), with wide boulevards and parks
and superbly clean, belies its old reputation as the last dictatorship in Europe. Its economy is heavily statist,
but 30 percent is private enterprise,
and its information-technology sector is world class. Its rating in the
World Bank’s Doing Business, which
compares all the world’s nations, is
surprisingly high and improving.
34 iF Magazine | September 2016
The nation borders Russia, Ukraine,
Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania. It has its
own language, similar to but distinct
from Russian, and its own long history. It was once an integral part of the
Lithuanian empire, which stretched
down to the Black Sea. It then was
subordinated to the growing power
of Czarist Russia and later became
an integral part of the Soviet Union.
Belarus also became an industrial/
technological center where many of
the Soviet Union’s heavy and sophisticated industries were located. It has
a very skilled and educated workforce.