Confuse the Cat: Baltic Data

by Dirk Ehnts, Econoblog101 I found Google Public Data Explorer and I like it tremendously. Remember those discussion about the Baltics and how they do under austerity? You now can fact check any commentators claims quite rapidly. Let’s try it out on Ned Dolan, writing at Roubini.com: Commentators often portray the Baltic countries as laboratories for testing the effects of austerity under fixed exchange rates. Although they share many common traits, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have each followed distinctive paths during the global economic crisis. Estonia maintained tighter fiscal discipline going into the crisis, helping it to win entry into the Euro. Latvia suffered the deepest slump, but it has stuck with its austerity program for better or worse and has recently recorded some of the fastest quarterly growth rates in the EU. This post examines the distinctive elements tha...