Vista Analyse Launches the Baltic Regional Accounts in New Research Article

In a new research article in the journal “Data”, Vista and its partners publish regional accounts for the Baltics with an internationalization focus. The article is entitled “Internationalization in the Baltic Regional Accounts: A NUTS 3 Region Dataset”.

The publication includes a comprehensive dataset for the 21 Baltic NUTS-3 regions for use in analysis and research. The most unique feature of the associated dataset is that it contains internationalization data including variables related to trade, foreign direct investments, and migration. In addition, it is considerably more comprehensive than other regional datasets for the Baltics.

Partner in Vista Analyse, Rasmus Bøgh Holmen, has led the work. The project is carried out in collaboration with him Nicolas Gavoille at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Jaan Masso at the University of Tartu and Arūnas Burinskas at the University of Vilnius.

– We are pleased to work internationally with macro and industry statistics in collaboration with solid partners. The project contributes to Vista Analyse's portfolio within international and regional economics, Holmen comments.

Beyond internationalization, the dataset also covers a rich range of domestic fields, including fixed capital, labor participation, price developments, value added, generation and sharing of knowledge, demographics, the population’s well-being and physical settlement conditions. Many of the dataset's variables include more dimensions than time and regions, such as industries in the data on the production economy and demographic groups in the population data.

The research article describes how internationalization variables and fixed capital figures are estimated. Furthermore, it documents how data in the regional accounts have been collected, processed and cleaned, as well as approximated in cases with missing or not reliable observations.

The research article also provides an overview of descriptive conditions related to the Baltic economy. The descriptive analyses relate to internationalization seen in the context of the production economy, settlement patterns and knowledge generation.

– It is well known among economists that Estonia has somewhat higher income levels than Latvia and Lithuania. However, the major differences between the Baltic regions are not found between the countries, but along the urbanization scale, says Holmen.

Overall, direct foreign investment and trade tend to be strongly correlated with the indicators of economic performance, social development, and knowledge generation. The correlations between migration and the same indicators are generally considerably weaker.

The research article is linked to the research project “LIFT”, which stands for “Labor, Innovation, Foreign direct investments and Trade”. The project is about regional economic integration in Northern Europe and is carried out by researchers from Norway and the Baltic countries. It is funded by the EEA and Norway Grants through the Research Council of Lithuania.

Holmen has led the project's work package on direct foreign investment and the Norwegian participation in the project on behalf of Institute of Transport Economics. He may be contacted in case of questions or inquiries about the project or the article.

You may download the article here and the dataset here.