Not to mention Estonia is tiny.

Most ME countries are probably more on the trajectory of the Ukraine or Byelorussia--I don't know which one's the more depressing sight--if not Turkmenistan or other even worse horror stories.

isn't estonia's economy being floated by its natural resources? i recall something about logging...

it's also more integrated into europe and especially scandinavia. when one only has to ride a ferry for 45 minutes to be in helsinki, i would think it changes things a bit.

Estonia was most likely choosen as an example because it is one of the countries that has actually managed to achive sustained growth by adapting the neoliberal economic model. I believe someone liked the model and searched the globe for places where it worked. Rather than searching the globe for countries that has achives sustained growth, regardless of economic model. (I guess you would find most good examples in Southeast Asia if you did).

However Estonia is probably the example to follow if your country happens to be small and surrounded by rich industrialised countries that need somewhere to outsource production.

I also suspect that there are many a lessons to be learned about rapid institution building from the Baltic countries. Implementation is after all always important, no matter the choice of economic policies.

Also seems to prove that you really don't need anyone over 40 to run a country. Something that I have always suspected.

... And many ME countries are floating in oil. While Rome and Barcelona might be a longer ferry trek away, that doesn't seem to hurt Israel too much.

...

If Matthew's jibe is directed at me, I complain of being misrepresented.

No, FA, no one specific in mind.

alrighty.

Estonia has been great in developing tech. For instance, Skype has a main office there:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/technology/13skype.html?ei=5088&en=06f1efc1e11e7049&ex=1292130000

Clearly being a small country allows them to be nimble. I think big moves might be afoot in Qatar over the next few years. As someone else said though, implementation is key.

Ironically, I just read about the 2006 "State of the World Liberty Index", which has Estonia ranked #1:
http://www.freewebs.com/globalliberty/rankings.htm

Bahrain and Kuwait lead MENA at 68 and 72 respectively.

"isn't estonia's economy being floated by its natural resources? i recall something about logging..." - no, not really. Most of the raw timber nowadays comes to Estonia from abroad, the local stock hasn't been enough for the industry for some time now.

Using former Soviet and/or new EU countries is a bit deceptive though. Estonia is just the latest poster child country in a long string of "free market success stories" with past hyped economies being Ireland and Slovakia. Freeing up the free market does some grand things, but it's pretty easy to lower your taxes, tariffs, and regulations while maintaining popular cradle to grave social programs when you're being subsidized by the old socialist EU economies. It also helps to have a large post-Soviet labor pool of well educated and experienced people who are willing to work for smaller salaries and able to create fully functional new businesses. Having no barriers to rich EU markets is also a huge plus. Few or none of these things are apparent in the MENA region as far as I can tell, and so I would expect any MENA economy trying a quick move along the post-Soviet/new-EU model will end up more like Bolivia or Nicaragua than Slovakia or Estonia.

Not that it wouldn't be better than the current vampire states, but I think the "free your markets and prosperity will automatically follow" hypothesis has failed so many times that countries like Estonia are more an exception than the rule.

'past hyped economies' are also Portugal and Spain, and they are managing pretty well along with Ireland. It's not hype, mate. Besides, 'being subsidized by the old socialist EU economies' is bollocks, the total budget of EU could in no way handle social welfare, which it doesn't do nor is supposed to do anyway. Those arguments are pulled out of thin air.

Someone remind me to come back to this idiocy when I resurface:
Estonia was most likely choosen as an example because it is one of the countries that has actually managed to achive sustained growth by adapting the neoliberal economic model

Leaving aside the illiterate "neo-liberal" idiocy, in fact liberal economics has a very decent track record, regardless of the"neo Left moron" whinging on and selective cherry picking.

Re: Estonia the Model: having visited Estonia not long before the breakup of the USSR, and having lived in Russia proper both pre- and post-breakup, one cannot overestimate the importance of differentiating the nature and level of economic activity, including the standard of living and quality of industrial production, among the various fragments of the East Bloc.

Arriving in Estonia from Leningrad in 1989 was almost like arriving in the West; there was food (and soap!) available in shops even without ration coupons, as were necessary in many Soviet cities for basic household items. Unlike in state-owned consumer-oriented businesses in Russia, people were actually polite and had a certain level of customer service, even in state-owned enterprises. Available, locally produced goods were not the subpar crap found at the time in many Russian shops (moldy rotten vegetables and the like, plus clothing that dissolved when worn, let alone washed). The disparities were large enough that people traveled from Leningrad, let alone from rural areas, to Tallinn to go shopping, with the result that some of the more militant Estonian shop personnel would ask any customers speaking Russian (including those poor hapless visiting Americans who didn’t have the foresight to learn Estonian for the trip) to produce documentary proof that they lived in the area before selling them so much as a bag of apples. All in all, even under Soviet control, the Baltics were a much more pleasant place to be than Russia proper, let alone somewhere like Turkmenistan, and that’s not just my part-Baltic origins talking.

Also keep in mind that Estonian and Finnish are mutually intelligible with exposure, and so even leaving aside the shorter exposure of the Baltic Republics to the socialist work ethic, Estonians could watch Finnish TV and listen to Finnish radio with few difficulties, and so had a window to the West even before the breakup (and that’s even if you don’t count all the Finns who took the ferries over to Tallinn for the cheap booze).

Estonian and Finnish are mutually intelligible with exposure

dang, I actually didn't know that. Must be the only language that is related to Finnish. The Baltics have always endeavoured to belong to the west, and Scandinavia in particular. Racism towards the Russian minority abounds. There are just so many factors that differentiates this 'example' from other regions such as the Stans. And, for the record, the former communist Eastern Europe is generally doing really, really well.

in Latvia i remember a clear racism toward the ethnic latvians from the large russian (minority? majority?).

isn't Finnish related to Farci and Hungarian somehow too?

For the record, Finish is not that closely related to Farsi--actually, I seem to recall that English is closer to Farsi than Finnish is (I don't know how linguists evaluate these measures, I just repeat what they say.). Hungarian is a harder lot--they are both Uralic languages and have certain similarities, but I think they are rather far. There are isolated pockets in Northern Russia where the locals speak various Uralic languages--Karelians being the most important group (of course, they are just across the border from Finland). I seem to recall a story in the Economist from a few years ago about the brouhaha between Russia and Finland over the latter's attempts at subsidizing these groups' cultural activities.

in Latvia i remember a clear racism toward the ethnic latvians from the large russian (minority? majority?).

And vice versa, to be sure. Latvia in Soviet times had the largest ethnic Russian population of the Baltic Republics, which was actually the reason I never got to go there (yet, anyway - which really pissed me off, because my grandfather was born there; our academic director vetoed Latvia in favor of Estonia because Latvia was "too Russian," and he wanted us to see something else). But I've certainly heard much anti-Russian superiority complex ranting from all sorts of Soviet minority ethnicities when no Russians were around, Balts included - and one easy way to piss off an Estonian in 1989 was to speak Russian. (Our signed pledge to speak only Russian was suspended for the duration of our stay in Estonia; anything else, including English, German, or whatever - and one of us even spoke some Finnish - got a much warmer reception).

There are isolated pockets in Northern Russia where the locals speak various Uralic languages--Karelians being the most important group (of course, they are just across the border from Finland).

If you're interested in that kind of thing, check out the Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire; it's sort of the endangered species list for languages of the FSU, though some of the ones on the list have been growing - the Tabasarans, for example, have been reproducing like bunnies...(ahem, not that I would know anything about that).

Eva: all i know is that the Russian hair dresser i saw in Riga did a bang-up job -- enough to get me mistaken for a Russian mafia bag boy in Warsaw! good times... good times... (and, come to think of it, that happened at about this time last year!)

also, gotta say, by in large, the ethnic Russians i met in Latvia were much hotter than the ethnic Latvians.

and, naturally, i manage to pull the conversation toward an old Aqoul favourite topic: SEX!

Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language, while both Farsi and English are Indo-European, even if distant from each other. So, Finnish is about as close to Farsi or English as it is to Arabic -- i.e, not close at all.

As far as I know, it's really only related to Hungarian, Estonian and Sami (which does have a small number of Sápmi speakers in N. Russia, as well as in Finland, Sweden and Norway - but there's a mindboggling number of dialects for such a small people), plus some mini-minority variants of these (Meänkieli, Karelian Finnish, Kvänic, etc), and perhaps an extinct language or two.

As for Estonia, they strike me as a very successful and fast-growing economy indeed. I was there in, uh, '97 I think, and from what I hear from friends, it's hardly recognizable now.

Sure, they were always going to do better than their neighbours, since they had a better starting position. But they've also been able to exploit their geographical and economic position much more than these neighbours, after having deliberatly gone much further and faster down the road of liberalization. They explicitly aimed at having the most deregulated, low-tax economy in the area, even if it would mean a really painful reform pace in the beginning.

There were plenty of articles in the Swedish press about how the Estonians even worried now that when entering the EU, they would be forced to adopt all kinds of illiberal EU regulations and standards... so as for them being subsidized by EU socialism, that's bullshit. They're doing great so far, considering where they came from, and they've earned it. If it's neoliberalism, I don't know, but more people should do it.

Although, yes, it will probably be a lot harder in the Middle East. Most countries there have a far messier social/political scene, which would be less well-equipped to take the transition shock; also far lower education levels, infrastructure, etc. Not to mention that the EU and US are being rather less than generous towards the M. East on trade issues, while they embraced the former Soviet states.

Also, I think it is psychologically/politically important that the current (vampire) systems are not seen as products of foreign occupation, but as something (for good or bad) indigenous to the country, that is being faced with foreign/Western-inspired reform pressures. There was no Nasserite nostalgia and anti-Globalism protest when the Estonians shed their Soviet-era regulations, but there certainly will be in Egypt.

My dears

Let me emphasise this:
Also, I think it is psychologically/politically important that the current (vampire) systems are not seen as products of foreign occupation, but as something (for good or bad) indigenous to the country, that is being faced with foreign/Western-inspired reform pressures. There was no Nasserite nostalgia and anti-Globalism protest when the Estonians shed their Soviet-era regulations, but there certainly will be in Egypt.

That is the problem in a nutshell - MENA is not E. Europe, it's Russia. The problems are native - not 100% but enough.

Estonia may not suit for other countries because in the beginning of 1990s Estonia was disassembled and re-assembled as a country, replacing former communist apparatus with non-communist. It was both change in software and hardware. Unless really desperate, no country would want to do this.