How has the Dutch economy changed in recent years?
Netherlands is a service-oriented economy, which is moving more and more towards added value and knowledge intensive activities. More than half of the European logistics operations of foreign companies are based in the Netherlands. Goods come here and enter the European market via the largest harbor of Europe, in Rotterdam, and one of the largest airports, Amsterdams Schiphol, to be re-exported to the major economic zones in Central Europe and Germany and in the north of France. Prior to the current economic crisis, we had a growth of 2% to 3% GNP and a sound government budget with a surplus. That has changed very rapidly over the last nine months and we expect the economy to shrink by 4.5% in 2009 and recover 0.75% in 2010. We predict that the government budget will fall back from a surplus of 1% into a deficit range over the next two years of between 6% and 7%. As an open economy with a large and internationally oriented financial sector and high trade volumes, the Dutch economy has
