Tag Archives: latvia

Estonian unemployment is still climbing

Posted on 17 February 10 | Leave a comment

There were fewer jobs and more job seekers in Estonia in the 4th quarter of 2009. According to the Estonian Labor Force Survey conducted by Statistics Estonia, the country’s unemployment rate increased to 15.5% and the number of unemployed persons rose to 107,000. Both figures are record highs for the period since 1991.

Estonia’s unemployment rate remains the 3rd-highest in Europe, trailing only Latvia (22.8%) and Spain (19.5%). The 4th quarter unemployment rate across the 27-member European Union was 9.6%. Unemployment in the United States at the end of the 4th quarter was 10.0%.

As discussed in this earlier post, the job picture for young people aged 15 to 24 is particularly bad. Moreover, according to the Estonian Labor Force Survey, the number of children suffering from the effects of their parents’ unemployment is also increasing:

[M]ore and more children are in [a] difficult economic situation. The number of children (less than 18 years of age) in … jobless households was 37,000 in the 4th quarter of 2009, which is over two times more than a year ago.

The survey also asked respondents how well they were coping, and the results are sadly unsurprising: fewer than half of all respondents rated their coping as “satisfactory,” with 16% of the population (164,000 people) reporting “great difficulties” in coping.

Let’s hope things begin to turn around soon.

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Estonia launches a global movement

Posted on 28 January 10 | 1 Comment

The hottest new Estonian export is not a product or a service. It is the deceptively simple idea that, if you make it fun, and create a sufficiently groovy vibe around it, you can mobilize huge numbers of people to clean up massive amounts of illegally-dumped garbage — all in one day. The concept, perhaps better described as a movement, is called Let’s Do It!

Estonia first “did it” almost two years ago, effectively demonstrating the concept on the 3rd of May, 2008. The country mobilized 50,000 volunteers to clean up 10,000 tons of garbage: trash that had been dumped illegally in forests and meadows, along roadsides and riverbeds, all over the country.

It took a lot of planning. For months beforehand, volunteers had crisscrossed the country on foot with GPS-enabled cell phones to map the illegally-dumped garbage. Then they created an effective marketing buzz around the project, getting politicians and celebrities involved, and succeeded in achieving something quite remarkable: they made garbage collection cool.

Let's Do It! volunteers demonstrate an uncanny enthusiasm for their work

Now word has spread. A conference held in Tallinn last weekend attracted eight countries: Slovenia, Portugal, Romania, India, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. The movement has put up a website. And they’ve attracted the notice of media outlets as far afield as France, India, and Singapore.

So pick up some trash. You’ll be cool if you do.

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Percentage of foreign citizens in Estonia’s population is 3rd-highest in Europe

Posted on 30 December 09 | Leave a comment

Estonia ranks third in the European Union in its proportion of foreign citizens, according to a study published last week by the EU’s statistical agency Eurostat to mark International Migrants Day. Foreign citizens comprise approximately 17% of Estonia’s population, placing Estonia third behind Luxembourg (43%) and Latvia (18%).

At the bottom of the rankings is Romania, with foreign citizens representing just 0.1% of its population.

Who are Estonia’s foreign citizens? The Eurostat study is silent on this question, with a footnote that detailed data on Estonia is unavailable. But some insight can be gained by looking at the data for neighbor Latvia. According to Eurostat, most (89.5%) of Latvia’s foreign citizens are classified as recognized non-citizens, a category defined as:

… [A] person who is neither a citizen of the reporting country nor of any other country, but who has established links to that country which includes some but not all rights and obligations of full citizenship.

One can reasonably assume that a similar proportion of Estonia’s foreign citizens is made up of recognized non-citizens. And just who are these RNCs? According to 2000 census figures, 25.6% of Estonia’s population is ethnically Russian, with another 2.1% Ukrainian and 1.3% Belarusian.

Would you be surprised to learn that the majority of foreign-citizenship leader Luxembourg’s foreign citizens are Portuguese? The complete study is here.

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On eve of Copenhagen conference, Estonians express indifference to global warming

Posted on 6 December 09 | 2 Comments

See no warming, hear no warming?

In survey results published today, Estonia came in dead last among 54 countries in the proportion of its population expressing a high level of concern about global climate change. According to the survey of 27,548 respondents in 54 countries, conducted in October 2009, just 10% of Estonians are “very concerned about climate change/global warming.”

The most concerned nations in the survey were those that have recently been devasted by natural disasters attributable to climate change, including the Philippines (78% very concerned about climate change) and Indonesia (66%). Across all 54 countries an average of 37% of the population was very concerned about climate change.

Estonians’ level of indifference was almost matched by its immediate neighbor to the south. Only 12% of Latvians are very concerned about the problem about which some 100 world leaders will be meeting in Copenhagen for two weeks beginning tomorrow. Lithuanians, by contrast, are closer to the global average: 32% of them are very concerned.

Why do Estonians evince such indifference? Are they ignorant of the looming problem? Are they simply expressing a naked self-interest, stemming from the belief (or hope) that human populations in the Baltic Sea region will be among the few to benefit from global warming? Or perhaps Estonians are just reluctant to admit, to a pollster, to being “very concerned” about anything.

The survey was conducted by The Nielsen Company and the Oxford University Institute of Climate Change. Complete results are here.

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Number of Estonians out of work sets a new record

Posted on 14 November 09 | Leave a comment

unemploymentThis has been a big week for bad economic news from Estonia. Fast on the heels of Thursday’s depressing GDP report, Statistics Estonia, the official Estonian statistics agency, yesterday published the 3rd quarter unemployment figures — and they are not pretty. Both the number of people unemployed (102,000) and the overall unemployment rate (14.6%) are at record-high levels for the current era of Estonian independence, dating back to 1991.

Estonia now has the third-highest unemployment rate in the European Union (EU), trailing only Latvia (19.7%) and Spain (19.3%). The average unemployment rate across the 27 countries in the EU is 9.2%, while the unemployment rate in the United States is currently 10.2%. (Lithuania’s 3rd-quarter unemployment figures have not yet been released; Lithuania had the third-highest unemployment rate in the EU in the 2nd quarter.)

The Estonian employment situation is particularly bleak for young people. The unemployment rate for people between the ages of 15 and 24 has now reached 29.2%; fully three out of every ten young Estonians who are seeking a job cannot find one. This rate has doubled over the past year.

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Has the Estonian economy turned the corner?

Posted on 12 November 09 | Leave a comment
At the Tallinn Central Market (keskturg)

Economic activity at Keskturg (Tallinn Central Market)

The official estimate of Estonia’s third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) was released today by Statistics Estonia. The number is grim, but if you squint and tilt your head a bit you might—just possibly—be able to see the glass as half-full.

The total value of all goods and services produced by Estonia in the July-through-September period this year declined by 15.3% compared to what was produced in the comparable period of 2008.

To place this in a regional perspective, Estonia’s GDP collapsed more than did Lithuania’s (down 14.3%), but it wasn’t quite as bad as Latvia’s (down 18.4%).

SEB economist Mikael Johansson (quoted in this Dow Jones wire report) sees in the 3rd quarter data a sign that the Estonian economy has stabilized. His cautious optimism is supported by this Statistics Estonia chart:

estonia 3q gdp

The bars show the ugly quarterly GDP declines, stretching back nearly two years. But optimists will want to focus on the pink line, which shows that the rate of decline in Estonian exports bottomed out in the 1st quarter and that exports have been shrinking more slowly over the past 6 months; and the red line, which suggests a bottoming of industrial decline in the 2nd quarter.

One footnote: Statistics Estonia notes that the -15.3% GDP figure is a preliminary, “flash” estimate; a more accurate 3rd quarter GDP estimate will be released on the 9th of December. Mark your calendar.

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Before the Berlin Wall fell, hands were joined across the Baltic States

Posted on 9 November 09 | Leave a comment

baltic wayToday we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most visually arresting symbol of the collapse of totalitarianism across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

But this collapse was a multi-year process which began, arguably, with the Solidarity workers’ strikes in Gdansk in 1980 and didn’t end until the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.

While the demolition of the Berlin Wall captured the bulk of the Western media’s attention, it followed by 2 1/2 months an event of perhaps greater political impact and certainly of broader geographical reach. This event, known as the Baltic Way, occurred when more than one million Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians joined hands to form a human chain that stretched for 600 kilometers (373 miles) from Tallinn to Vilnius.

The event, held on 23 August 1989, was organized to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which laid the foundation for the Soviet occupation of the three Baltic States.

The Baltic Way was a brazen nonviolent defiance of authority, and it was all the more remarkable for having been organized long before the availability of Twitter, e-mail, or cell phones. It inspired and gave strength to democratic movements across Eastern Europe and paved the way for the breach of the Berlin Wall 10 weeks later.

Read more about the Baltic Way here. And watch a musical tribute to the event here.

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Posted in History, News, Uncategorized

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Gender inequality persists in Estonia

Posted on 1 November 09 | Leave a comment

Plenty sisterEstonia is making achingly-slow progress toward gender equality, and the country still has a long way to go. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2009, Estonian women are about 71 percent as empowered as Estonian men. This ratio has been creeping upward, albeit at a snail’s pace, over the past four years. But other countries are improving more quickly, so Estonia’s standing in the world, which fell in 2007 and 2008, remained stuck at 37th place in 2009.

The annual study examines gender equality in four areas, and Estonia distinguishes itself in none of them. The four areas (along with Estonia’s global rank in each): economic participation and opportunity (36); educational attainment (37); health and survival (41); and political empowerment (50).

The report exposes some glaring areas of inequality. Unlike its near neighbors Finland (#2 overall in the world), Latvia (#14), and Lithuania (#30), Estonia has never had a woman as head of state. And Estonia’s index of wage equality for similar work was cringe-inducing; Estonian women earn only 60 percent as much as their male counterparts who do similar work.

Estonia was the 18th-ranked country in Europe, but it did place far ahead of such gender-inequality powerhouses as Luxembourg (#63 in the world), Italy, (#72), and Greece (#86). And the study revealed that Estonian women are 63 percent more likely than men to enroll in post-secondary education. Can this perhaps be viewed as a favorable leading indicator of future equality?

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