Those selfish Lithuanians do not want to die

There is a sharp contrast between the behavior of two Baltic nations with  close languages. In Latvia, where the government laid off a third of its civil servants, cut wages for the rest and significantly reduced support for hospitals, people mostly accepted the cruel treatment. Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who lorded over the austerity, was re-elected, not thrown out of office, as many of his counterparts elsewhere have been. At the same time, private businesses followed the government in cutting wages, which made the country’s labor force more competitive by reducing the prices of its goods. This is the function of this sacrifice: to make the exported goods inexpensive for others. Nothing good came out of it for Latvia's people.

As a result, since 2008, Latvia has lost more than 5 percent of its population, mostly young people, to emigration. The recent moving out peaked in 2010, when 42,263 people left for abroad, a big number in a country of just two million now, according to Mihails Hazans, a professor at the University of Latvia.

Economic gains have still left 30.9 percent of Latvia’s population “severely materially deprived,” according to 2011 data released in December by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, second only to Bulgaria. Unemployment has decreased from more than 20 percent in early 2010, but was still 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, according to Eurostat, and closer to 17 percent if “discouraged workers” are included [1]. The Latvians completely and without any fight disassembled everything that kept them standing together as a nation. 


 The data are from Paul Krugman [2]. 

The governing clique led by Valdis Dombrovskis sacrificed the Latvians for sake of the population in the countries, who receive the cheap Latvian export. Those importing Latvian goods got cheaper prices cushioning the impact of the Big Recession there. The Latvians are ready to die out disappearing as a nation through the material deprivation and emigration. They forgive Mr. Dombrovskis though. Those pesky Lithuanians threw the Lithuanian counterpart of Mr. Dombrovskis, another austerity hawk, Mr. Andrius Kubilius,  out of the office in the same time. The Lithuanians want to fix their economy for themselves and live.  No wonder the people keeping the status quo in todays economical and political system think that the Lithuanians are just selfish. (Disclosure: the author of this comment is a Lithuanian who invested a lot of time into defeating Mr. Kubilius.)

1. Latvia Accepts Austerity, and Its Pain Eases. By ANDREW HIGGINS
2. Latvia, Once Again. BY PAUL KRUGMAN