Word: baltics
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...most likely candidate to become Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, comes from a small ethnic group known as Kaszebe (Kashubians) from the region around Gdansk on the Baltic coast. Like many Polish politicians, he is a veteran of the Solidarity trade union movement; he joined its student wing as a young history student, and as a result was forced to work as a manual laborer under martial law. Tusk is a familiar figure in the country's post-communist era, having served as deputy speaker of the Senate from 1997 to 2001 and as deputy speaker of the more powerful lower...
...Inside the fence, it turns out, some were asking the same question. In the whitewashed buildings of the elaborately restored Baltic resort of Heiligendamm, important things seemed to be happening. Russia's Vladimir Putin and President Bush strolled out past the massive beds of hydrangeas to say they had held good discussions on missile defense in Europe, with Putin provocatively proposing the use of Russian installations as a substitute for the ones the U.S. plans to place in Poland and the Czech Republic. And the G-8 leaders agreed on a putative program for addressing climate change...
...news has not been uniformly good, however, and some Baltic cities have fallen behind. Gdansk in northern Poland was another Hanseatic League trading center that has recently emerged from communism. But like other parts of northern Poland and eastern Germany, it has failed to attract the levels of investment enjoyed by some Baltic cities. In the 1970s, Gdansk's famous shipyard employed 17,000 people and produced 30 ships a year. Today, as Japanese, South Korean and other shipbuilders have come to dominate, 3,000 Polish workers in Gdansk produce just a handful of ships, while Poland's share...
Even among the successful Baltic economies, some storm clouds are brewing. High growth rates have triggered fears of overheating, especially in the new democracies. Latvia's President Vaira Vike-Freiberga recently complained that Swedish banks are too generous with their loans, tempting Latvian consumers to load up on debt, and driving up the prices of everything from cars to property. Latvia's year-on-year inflation rate hit 8.9% in April, triggering devaluation rumors. Latvian loans are denominated in euros, so devaluing the national currency, the lat, would hit debtors hard. "Like any good party it has to come...
...potential threat. Several years ago, for example, Moscow tripled export taxes on goods traveling to Latvia in order to help its own ports, a measure that has pumped up St. Petersburg but slowed growth in rivals like Riga. And despite all the hype about free trade, the Baltic Sea region is still not capitalizing on its full potential: an economic study by the Swedish Board of Trade estimates that the elimination of existing investment and trade barriers in all Baltic Sea countries would add 1% - or about $30 billion - to the region's overall gdp. That said, there...