Insidious Nature-Labour-Capital Complementarity

It is known that the productive nature-labour-capital triad gains connotation and meaning depending on the historical, territorial, and political context in which it occurs. When Ricardo told us that people ”rise” towards machinery and that fear of unemployment is irrational, he sent his thoughts to wander within the boundaries of a microenvironment and things seemed clear to him. They are no longer that simple when people from the East ”rise” towards the machinery of the West, in cadences and occupational structures shaped by factors difficult to be integrated in certain equations. This chapter tries to highlight in which manner, and with what consequences for the sustainable development of the East, does the human capital from the East ”rises” towards the machinery of the West or the movement of capital from the West towards the human resources of the East. We are also interested in the way in which regions with unused natural resources and insufficiently accumulated capital, such as those specific to Eastern Europe, are subjected to a confrontation of weak, direct substitution, Eastern nature—Western capital, often losing, with consequences on the production structures and healthy development in the East.