Word: easternism
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Locals in Riga, the Latvian capital, have a favorite trivia question: what was the biggest city in the 17th century Swedish empire? (Hint: it wasn't Stockholm.) For centuries, the stately medieval port on the shores of the eastern Baltic Sea served as the bustling gateway between Russia and the West. Then, following World War II, it withered after the Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe, cutting it off from the outside world. But Riga is now experiencing a renaissance. It may not have re-established the prominence it enjoyed 400 years ago, but as any of its trivia-wielding...
When the leaders of the G-8 countries descend on the Baltic seaside resort of Heiligendamm in eastern Germany on June 6-8 for their annual summit, they will be visiting a part of the world where eight of nine countries are growing faster than the E.U. average; where several, including Latvia, which last year expanded 11.9%, are topping the European table; and where trade is expected to soar 50% by 2020. The port at Hamburg, just west of Heiligendamm, has seen a 40% increase in cargo shipped through the Baltic Sea in each of the past three years...
That pattern has repeated itself throughout Eastern Europe. As the Soviet Union melted away, newly unfettered countries were primed and hungry for economic growth. Back in 1994, for example, Estonia became one of the world's first regimes with a flat tax on corporate and personal income. These young democracies also benefited from advantages shared by the region as a whole, including enviable political stability, social cohesion and a sound regulatory environment. Equally key, they boasted high levels of education and innovation, giving rise to outfits like the Internet telephone company Skype, which was founded by a Dane...
...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...
Elsewhere along the coast the story is much the same. The area around the city of Szczecin, on the border with Germany, recently placed last among Polish regions in a ranking of economic development, hobbled in large part by scant foreign investment. Poland has generally been slower than its eastern neighbors to embrace economic reforms, while red tape and a lack of bureaucratic transparency have also contributed to an unfriendly business environment...