Tales from Eastern Europe

If the only chance of decent growth for UK businesses lies in using the weak pound to sell cheap overseas, has Nottingham got a head start in the export race?
After all, the City Council has been drumming up support for trade missions to Minsk in Belarus and Timisoara in Romania.
The line is that both cities want to do major regeneration projects and that we've got the expertise to help them do it.
On top of that, the developers in Minsk actually want to call their project - a whole new quarter of their capital city - 'Nottingham'.
Guaranteed business for our own architects, engineers and construction companies, then?
Well, not quite.
Let's look at that Minsk project first. When you flick through the pictures in the brochure for 'Residential Complex Nottingham' you could be forgiven for thinking that they're trying to do a London Bridge, transplanting our Watson Fothergill architecture brick-by-brick the other side of Poland.
That's their way of saying they want a suburb that would be home to 20,000 people to have the look, feel and sophistication of a long-established English city.
And they are, apparently, willing to throw £500m at it.
I say apparently because the one question Nottingham businesses are asking is who's going to fund it?
They're asking for two reasons. One is that in this neck of the woods large-scale construction projects are guaranteed to make banks faint - this is where they lost [us] a packet in the credit crunch.
The second is that no one here really understands the way business operates in Belarus.
All we know at this stage is that the company behind the project, Univest, is a big conglomerate which has made a fortune out of energy. It also has some links with the country's President, the formidable Alexander Lukashenko.
President Lukashenko, who is happy to admit his authoritarian tendencies, is the kind of many who tells the economy which way to jump. So far it has done, avoiding recession because he told the factories to keep on running.
Who knows whether he will tell Minsk to build Nottingham.
Timisoara should be more straightforward. The seat of the revolution which overthrew the vile despot Nicolae Ceausescu, it is Romania's historic second city and chock full of old buildings looking for a new life.
Romania has become part of the European Union, opening the door to pots of cash aimed at helping the 'accession states' to overhaul infrastructures left creaking by decades of Communist neglect.
Timisoara's Mayor has yet to convince the EU to hand over any money. The idea is that Nottingham, which has long experience of extracting regeneration cash from Brussels, will show him how.
And if Nottingham shows him how, why not let the companies which did the work here do it over there?
Which makes sense - but we've got to get past EU contract regulations first.
These dictate that any contract above a certain value must be widely advertised and awarded via a proper tendering process. So Nottingham will be competing with Uncle Tomas Coblenz and all.
This doesn't mean these trade missions are a wild goose chase. Nottingham has already done what these cities are trying to do, there is genuine regeneration expertise among city firms, and when business opportunities are so thin on the ground here it would be daft to ignore them.
Nothing venture, nothing gained. And this is quite a venture.