Stefan Karlsson has a few notes on it:  Estonia and Latvia are doing quite well.  Europe in general, however, is a mixed bag.

As a quick exercise, here are Karlsson’s reports along with that country’s Heritage economic freedom ranking.  Let’s see if we can spot any trends.

  1. Rapid Boom:  Latvia (65.2; rank 56)
  2. Significant Growth:  Estonia (73.2; rank 16), Lithuania (71.5; rank 23), Slovakia (67.0; rank 51)
  3. Barely Growing:  Germany (71.0; rank 26), Bulgaria (64.7; rank 61), Austria (70.3; rank 28), France (63.2; rank 67)
  4. Mildly Contracting:  UK (74.1; rank 14), Romania (64.4; rank 62), Holland (73.3; rank 15), Belgium (69.0; rank 38), Finland (72.3; rank 17)
  5. Significantly Contracting:  Czech Republic (69.9; rank 30), Hungary (67.1; rank 49), Spain (69.1; rank 36), Portugal (63.0; rank 68), Italy (58.8; rank 92), Cyprus (71.8; rank 20)
  6. Depression:  Greece (55.4; rank 119)

It doesn’t look like there’s a big correlation here, but I wouldn’t really expect one for short-term trends.  The highest-ranked country is right in the middle, but we do see the worst-ranked countries (Italy, Greece, and Portugal) at the bottom.

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One thought on “European Economic Trends Of Late

  1. Definitely no obvious correlation; I’d trust the Czech economy much farther than the Slovak one, for example. Same thing with Romania; Slovakia and Romania have terrible infrastructure and it’s not getting much better very quickly.

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