mabrookes: Estonia has a half decent economy that is recovering well from the
global recession, often runs a budget surplus, and has a tiny amount of national debt. Estonia joining the EU is what helped them regain a decent economy. It is not perfect, and has its problems, but is not terrible at all.
Estonian economic was tied to Lithuania with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignalina_Nuclear_Power_Plant That plant was intended to supply Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia with energy for energy-intensive plants, like metallurgical and chemical.
Lithuania closed it, and it torpedoed any hope for region.
Imagine, you are wealthy investor, situation:
Would you build a plant in an energy-deprived region?
Would you build a plant in abandoned by most economically active people region (let's face it, people move into Germany for better average wage)?
"Stabilization" is caused by the fact that leftover people are too old and too poor to move.
There are less Estonians now than there were before 1922.
Yes, their GDP is "growing" on money sent by work migrants from wealthier Germany to Estonia. Communicating vessels, there's that.
Plus, Nato pays them for bitching about "evil Russians want to attack us", countless generals want to be paid for "defending freedom"
mabrookes: Or did you think nobody would be able to figure out the EU didn't cause problems a good 12 years before Estonia became a member, well before they even started trying and while their economy was still closely linked to Russia.
http://i.imgur.com/V5yr1jI.gif US and EU didn't cause aaaany problem for USSR. Never-ever tried to do... Seriously?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson%E2%80%93Vanik_amendment ^This shit resulted for Russian Federation being under sanctions until 2012 because of the things USSR did in 1974...
Bringing justice since never.
Crispy78: No source of the graph, not even a labelled axis. For all we know it could be a graph of number of KGB interrogations in each year.
Assuming it is what we're told though, are we honestly expected to *believe* Cold-War era Russia's reported figures for growth? Ha ha ha ha ha haaa!
Oh, shame on me for taking official data with the help of wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Estonia Same shit is here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Lithuania Common sense says that planned economic demands very precise numbers, well, for planning purposes.