National Human Development Report Estonia: 2010/2011

This year’s edition of the Estonian Human Development Report is unique in many ways. The report will reach the public at a time when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the reappearance of the free Baltic states on the world map. Consequently, the publication’s content and pool of contributors is different from usual. Although the 2010/2011 Human Development Report, as with reports published in previous years, was initiated and published by the Estonian Cooperation Assembly, each of its chapters has been compiled by an international team of authors, which includes Estonians as well as Latvians and Lithuanians. Chapters 4 and 5 provide a different perspective with experts from outside the Baltic states commenting on the region’s development. Each chapter covers a different aspect of human development in Estonia compared to the developments in Latvia and Lithuania over the period of the past two decades. Where possible, the development of the Baltic states is also compared to that of the other countries of the Baltic Sea region. Due to its publication at a time of symbolic significance, this year’s Estonian Human Development Report focuses on more than just our current state of development: instead, it attempts to describe our course of development over the past two decades. Perhaps the report should bear the subtitle “Baltic lessons”, since learning through the mutual comparison of experiences was definitely one of the objectives of the project.