Baltic Global Peace Index- Up's and down's

LONDON- Most countries in the Baltics (with the exception of Estonia) are becoming more peaceful compared to last year, as the Global Peace Index (GPI) revealed their statistics in a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

LETA reports that authors of the report encourage the governments globally to pay yet more attention to ensuring education, welfare and good governance principles in order to promote greater global stability. At the same time, the report underlines the role of businessmen in achieving this goal.

The Index ranked Estonia 35th in its Global Peace Index; last year Estonia placed 28th.

The Global Peace Index ranks countries of the world according to their peacefulness on the basis of 24 indicators measuring both internal and external peacefulness of nations, the EIU said.

The indicators include the levels of violence, organized crime and defense spending within a country. The index has also been correlated against a range of social development indicators including democracy, transparency, education and well-being.

This is the second edition of the survey, the first was conducted in 2007.

Estonia's high index ranking was due to the low level of internal organized conflict, the authors of the survey said.

A lower score on a scale of 1 to 5 indicates a more peaceful country. Estonia's overall score was 1.176.

Iceland topped the rankings with a score of 1.176. Next came Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Japan, Ireland, Portugal, Finland, Luxembourg and Austria.

In the group of Central and Eastern European countries Estonia placed 7th. In that group Slovenia did best, ranking 16th overall with a score of 1.491.

The Czech Republic placed 17th, Hungary 18th, Slovakia 20th, Romania 24th, Poland 31st, Latvia 39th, Lithuania 41st and Bulgaria 57th.

Britain's score of 1.801 put it in 49th position, the United States placed 97th and Russia 131st.

Israel, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and Iraq held the five bottom spots among the 140 countries covered by this year's index.