|
|
Today, the Baltic region is home to between 50 and 150 million people (depending on the exact definition) in nine countries, eight of which are in the European Union. They are the Scandinavian and Nordic states of Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the north-east of Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the north-west Russian regions of Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg. The area surrounding the Baltic Sea has seen a great deal of economic development over the last 20 years, with further acceleration following the accession of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to the EU in 2004. The states on the west of the Baltic – Finland, Sweden and Denmark – are advanced industrial nations, which are hugely important economic partners for northern Germany. Their eastern neighbours – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland – provide a liberal and low-cost environment for business activities. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are characterised by their well-educated labour forces, their attractive research and university environments and their great openness to IT applications. The European Innovation Scoreboard, which measures the innovative performance of individual states, puts four states in the Baltic region (Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Germany) among its top ten. Estonia has also improved its capacity for research and development significantly in recent years and is listed in 13th place. However, there are still huge differences between the economic performance per capita of the states in the Baltic region. Compared to the average for all 28 EU member states for 2015, the values range from 41 per cent of the average (Poland) to 170 per cent (Denmark and Sweden). This is despite the enormous progress Poland has made economically over the last ten years, more than doubling its gross domestic product (GDP), between 2004 and 2014, to 413 billion euros. Today, the eight EU states with direct access to the Baltic Sea, home to 29 per cent of the EU population, make up 30.4 per cent of the total GDP of all EU member states. Only the Russian region of Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast and the St. Petersburg area are not part of the EU, although they do offer a useful gateway to the large, albeit currently difficult, Russian market.
|