Members of the European Union (EU) since 2004, the Baltic countries have become, in a very short period of time, a formidable example of financial management and promotion of competitiveness and investment.
After a bold adjustment in 2009, which included very significant cuts in public spending and a contractive fiscal policy to contain the deficit, these three markets experimented the fastest recovery in the whole of the EU, returning to a growth of 6% in the last quarter of 2009, after having fallen over 15% during the first 9 months of the year. The construction sector, which sagged in 2009 and the retail one, which lost a third of its size in the same year, have ceased being a ballast for the rest of the economy and a boom in exports and in internal consumption have propelled the Baltics to the path of a sound and sustainable growth, based now in productivity and not anymore in bubbles. Their unemployment figures are already below 8% in the three countries, once they have already overcome the pandemic crisis of COVID-19. In fact, their economies are now 9% larger than before the pandemic (compared to the EU as a whole, which has barely managed to recover its previous level).