Top article in the on-line version of Computer Currents magazine.
Pollys take note.

EU $210bn Y2K Problems
http://www.currents.net/newsletter/1094.html

Daily News
EU $210bn Y2K Problems
By Martyn Williams, Newsbytes
July 13, 1999

Member states of the European Union could see losses of up to US$210.4 billion from problems related to the year 2000 computer problem, according to a report just released by London-based International Monitoring.

The root cause of the problems, said the group, will be an estimated 58 billion errors in hardware, software and embedded systems that are triggered by the Y2K bug.

Software will account for 84 percent of all problems while hardware-related problems will make up 15 percent of errors and embedded systems will contribute just 1 percent of Y2K glitches.

Of the errors, just ten percent are expected to show their heads as the clocks move to January 1 with the majority of remaining errors expected to occur before the end of this year.

By far worst affected stands to be Germany, where ...
[snip]

-- A (A@AisA.com), July 19, 1999

Answers

The rest of it's worth posting too, A, especially yhe very last paragraph:

By far worst affected stands to be Germany, where International Monitoring expects damages to reach $57.7 billion. Italy, with estimated losses of $36.9 billion, is in second place followed by France at $35.7 billion, the United Kingdom at $22.6 billion and Spain at $21.2 billion.

Estimates for other EU member states are: Netherlands, $7.0 billion; Greece, $6.2 billion; Austria, $5.1 billion; Belgium, $4.7 billion; Portugal, $4.7 billion; Sweden, $3.4 billion; Finland, $2.2 billion; Denmark, $2.0 billion; and Ireland, $0.8 billion. The group failed to rank Luxembourg because of insufficient data.

The group categorized the damage likely to be caused into three main areas. Direct damage consists of the problems with systems directly and their immediate environments, indirect damage refers to problems of business partners, customers, vendors, regulators or others having a relationship with the directly damaged organization and ambient damage is caused by non-standard behavior.

Ranking nations by the likelihood or Y2K failures and delays, the group named Greece as the nation most at risk and then Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, France, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland. Luxembourg, again, was not ranked because of insufficient data.

The group came to its monetary figures by first estimating the amount of hardware, software and embedded systems in use in the EU and then estimating software fix efficiency and the number of systems likely to be not ready due to late starts. The group then ends with the number of bugs likely to cause problems. Damage estimates are then made based on the economic profile and technology utilisation within the various countries.

International Monitoring notes most bugs will be small inconveniences, but some could cause failures in critical national infrastructures.

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), July 19, 1999.

Git -- you're right -- doesn't hurt to be real explicit.

International Monitoring notes most bugs will be small inconveniences, but some could cause failures in critical national infrastructures. [emphasis added].

-- A (A@AisA.com), July 19, 1999.