Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, the nation of Iceland was one of the first places to be brought to its economic knees by the global recession last year. I posted about the situation just as our own stock market was free-falling last October and again back in March of this year (last item in the post).
Now, a year on, the Times of London looks at the events of the last twelve months in Iceland. Because the story ran in the “Women’s” section, there’s a somewhat odd slant of the story as it talks about the election of the current prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, and the replacement of most of the cabinet ministers with women, but if you can get beyond the patronizing tone of that part of the article, it’s a good review.
Relatedly, The Nation has this article about the state of the Latvian economy, which also went tits-up last year and has been struggling quite badly since. Like Iceland, Latvia had been experiencing a boom through financial speculation, even as Latvia had been experiencing emigration of its labor force to the rest of Europe (Latvia joined the EU in 2004). Unlike Iceland, which has a very homogenous population and culture, Latvia has a very large Russian minority as a legacy of its forced inclusion in the Soviet Union, and political stability has been far less easily maintained than in placid, plodding Iceland.
