When judged either by educational attainment of adult population or by secondary and tertiary enrollment rates, by 2002 Albania compared very unfavorably to most European countries, including its neighbors. This study examines the determinants of secondary enrollment applying unobserved family...

This paper examines human capital gap between titular ethnicities and Russianspeaking minorities, which has emerged in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during the transition and remains significant after controlling for parental education. For recent cohorts, unexplained gap is declining in...

The global crisis hit hard in Iceland and Latvia. Economic development prior to the crisis, as well as response to the crisis, was different in these two countries, also yielding different results. Prior to the crisis both countries privatized their banking system. In Iceland the banks were sold...

This paper sets out to investigate entrepreneurs in Latvia, which is one of the most advanced transition countries, having joined the European Union in 2004. Empirically, the paper draws on results from a representative survey of the Latvian population, based on the method of the Global...

The paper investigates whether the evidence suggests that a broadband package on the lines of the Obama package in the US or the Digital Britain initiative in the UK could be an appropriate instrument in recession-hit Latvia. The idea would be to use the opportunity of the recession to create a...

What a difference a year makes. Our previous report, from June 2007, focussed on overheating of the Latvian economy and rising inflation. Now, some 14 months later, the Latvian economy has entered recession as measured by two consecutive quarters of seasonally adjusted GDP decline. At the same...

This investigation addresses the issue of what truth there is behind the widespread belief that too few Latvian produced food products are available in Latvian shops. Using some simple concepts from economics we construct a number of empirical indicators that permit international comparisons to...

This report is the second in an annual series produced by BICEPS and SSE Riga on macro policy issues. The 2007 report is again on inflation but this time focusing only on Latvia. The inflation problem in Latvia has not gone away and if anything has intensified since early 2006 to the extent that...

The recently published guidelines for the medium term development of Latvia’s tax system (Nodokļu un nodevu sistēmas attīstības pamatnostādnes 2011-2015” have for the first time introduced social fairness (socialais taisnīgums) as an explicit goal of Latvian tax policy. Social fairness...