Industrial and intellectual capital clusters in the Baltic states
ENThe cities of the Baltic states, in contrast to structural problems of mono-enterprise regions, are blooming, specially in the respect to their strategic role in the Eastern-Western trade traffic corridor. Estonian capital Tallinn and its surroundings turned to be the flagship of growth in Estonia. The city with one third of total Estonian population and Northeastern Estonia are the most wealthy regions in the country. In Tallinn region there is the fastest dynamics in terms of wages, per capita turnover and per capita retail prices. There are located more than 59 per cent of all registered enterprises. 80-90 per cent of all FDI are concentrated in Tallinn and more than 80n per cent of all registered foreign companies. Private firms in Tallinn show much better results than anywhere else in the country. The difference between the capital region of Latvia and the rest territory is even more marked than in Estonia. About one third of the whole population of Latvia live in Riga and it is the biggest city in the Baltics. Economic concentration around such a big city in such a small country as Latvia can be very effective and serve as a base for many opportunities, but it also magnifies regional imbalances. In the rest of Latvia the wood industry and agricultural smallscale production are dominant. Latvia has maintained its position as an East-West transport corridor, and the government has tried to use the transport sector in order to diversify allocation of economic activities, to attract foreign investments, to create new plants and to improve business environment in the regions.In contrast to both Estonia and Latvia, in Lithuania there was not created any growth aureole around its capital Vilnius. Partly this is because Vilnius is located away from the Baltic sea. Hence trade is not as important as in as in the other Baltic capitals. Economic activity on the whole country territory is distributed rather uniformly, where the differences between agricultural and heavily industrialised regions are clearly seen. Nevertheless, bigger shares of FDI are concentrated in the capital (61 per cent), Klaipeda port (11 per cent) and Kaunas (10 per cent). The fact that in Lithuania there are three big cities Vilnius, Klaipeda and Kaunas, as well as various important urban settlement centres and good system of roads, can promote labour mobility and exchange. In contrast to Estonia and Latvia, in Lithuania there is no geographical concentration of minorities. The work reported so far describes various aspects of some quite remarkable geographical diversity in the apparently homogeneous Baltic states. The nest stage of the project is to dig deeper and seek explanations.
