Mna n hEireann should take note of Latvia’s experience –“No People, No Problem”: The Baltic Tigers’ False Prophets of Austerity By Jeffrey Sommers, Arunas Juska and Michael Hudson*. Ignore our politicians’ rhetoric about the value of ‘seeing the world’, exporting our young was ever the way to avoid dealing with entrenched interests (usually older) in Ireland.
“Now, after the storm has quieted in the Baltics, Anders Aslund and other apologists are at it again as they promote the Baltic model. Aslund did so most recently with his Petersen Institute banking industry funded book on Latvia’s “remarkable” rebound. The only thing he failed to mention was that Latvians were voting with their feet in record numbers. Latvians were exiting at a rate of roughly 1% of the population per month in an exodus of Biblical proportions. Indeed, Latvian’s census makers were horrified when they discovered that that the country’s population had decreased from 2.3 to 1.9 million people from 2001-2011.”
