(8)  Capacity to act  At a fundamental level, the economic and also social success of societies depends on their ability to adapt to and take advantage of changing circumstances. If anything, the importance of flexibility has only increased in the last years.
Cross-country differences are nowadays clearly reflected in almost any macroeconomic and financial time series, starting from interest rate spreads to economic forecasts. In fact, the signals coming from the most recent forecasts for the European Union are quite positive and the first quarter of 2011 has shown improvements that were larger than expected.