Latvia's GDP lags

  • 2003-02-06
RIGA

Latvia's gross domestic product per capita of population is one of the lowest among the European Union candidate states at just 31 percent of the average figure among EU member states, according to the information from the European statistics office Eurostat.

Still, according to the recent survey, which is based on the year 2000 living-standard figures, Latvia's position has improved from a similar survey based on 1998 results, when Latvia's GDP per capita amounted to only 28 percent of the EU average.

Among EU candidates, only Romania and Bulgaria had lower GDP per capita - at 23 percent and 26 percent respectively.

Latvia's Baltic neighbors also did not show the best results as Lithuanian GDP per capita equaled 36 percent and Estonian 40 percent of the EU average, despite improvement from the 1998 survey when Lithuanian GDP per capita was at 31 percent and Estonian at 37 percent of the EU level.

Although the survey studied EU candidate states by regions, Baltic states were taken as whole due to their small size and population.

Cyprus led all EU candidates based on GDP per capita at 76 percent of the EU average, followed by Slovenia at 67 percent and the Czech Republic at 56 percent.

The Eurostat survey showed that in general the situation in regions of the EU candidate states was much worse than in the EU. The only region to boast GDP per capita at 21 percent above the average EU level was the Czech capital Prague.

The richest regions in the EU are the British capital London, the Belgian capital Brussels, Luxembourg and Hamburg in Germany.