Numbers

The Three Baltic States

• Estonia
• Latvia
• Lithuania

How It's Used

“After Mr. Bush’s stop in St. Petersburg, he appeared at a rally in Vilnius, Lithuania, with the leaders of all three Baltic nations, which were admitted to NATO along with four other former Soviet bloc states.”

"On the eve of the Russia-EU summit today in France, the energy package released by the European commission highlighted Europe's dependence on Russian exports and sought to devise strategies to wean Europe off the addiction. Of six energy projects pinpointed for development, commission officials said the two 'absolute' priorities were to connect the three post-Soviet Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to European power grids and to forge ahead with the so-called 'southern gas corridor', which is supposed to transport gas from the Caspian basin to Europe while, for political reasons, bypassing the world's two biggest gas producers, Russia and Iran. Both projects are aimed at loosening Russia's grip."

"When the three Baltic nations—Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania—joined the European Union in 2004, it helped push their freewheeling economies into overdrive by offering a broader market for goods and making it easier to keep interest rates low. But now the union is often viewed as an overweening bureaucratic structure that pressed Riga to sign off on policies not in the nation's best interests."

"Just as it soon became apparent last year that CEE [central and eastern Europe] was no monolith, so variations this year will also be stark. Poland—the only EU country to escape recession—the Czech Republic and Slovakia should lead central Europe out of the downturn. They could, however, be hit by withdrawal of west European scrappage schemes that sustained their auto industries. These countries score well, too, in a Capital Economics survey of banking health, with limited foreign currency lending and secure bank funding positions. The three Baltic states, by contrast, whose fixed exchange rates precluded devaluation and forced an agonising real economic adjustment, will continue to shrink. Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria will be somewhere in between. But Capital Economics suggests all six countries' banking outlook remains 'worrying', with weak funding positions and rising bad debt. For western banks, renewed CEE expansion, on a selective basis, makes sense. But overall the region's banking sector is not out of the woods just yet."

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