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.
- Rapid Boom: Latvia (65.2; rank 56)
- Significant Growth: Estonia (73.2; rank 16), Lithuania (71.5; rank 23), Slovakia (67.0; rank 51)
- Barely Growing: Germany (71.0; rank 26), Bulgaria (64.7; rank 61), Austria (70.3; rank 28), France (63.2; rank 67)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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.
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.