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- 1.
Consisting of three countries: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
- 2.
The data in this paragraph are from various Internet sources.
- 3.
In the nineteenth century, when the territory of Latvia was part of the Russian Empire, 85 % of the inhabitants of Latvia could read and write (compared to 54 % inhabitants with such skills in the Russian Empire).
- 4.
i.e. transformation of Latvia into a Soviet republic, which included nationalization of property, terror and repressions, among other things.
- 5.
On June 14, 1941, alone, more than 15,000 Latvians were deported to Siberia.
- 6.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, initiated a series of political and economic reforms, collectively labelled as “perestroika” in 1985. Perestroika allowed more independent action at various ministries and is often perceived as a major catalyst for the breakup of the Soviet Union (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika for more information).
- 7.
Latvians comprise only 59.4 % of the total population of Latvia, 27.6 % being Russians, followed by Belarusians (3.6 %), Ukrainians (2.5 %) and Poles (2.3 %) (2010).
- 8.
The data in this paragraph and the next are from various Internet sources.
- 9.
It is worth noting, however, that the number of SMEs is considerably higher in Riga, the capital city of Latvia, reaching the EU average of approximately 50 SMEs per 1,000 inhabitants (Sauka and Welter 2010).
- 10.
Here, the term “shadow economy” is used to refer to all legal production of goods and services that is deliberately concealed from public authorities. This definition corresponds to what the System of National Accounts and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in their comprehensive 2002 handbook Measuring the Non-Observed Economy, refer to as “underground production”. It is also consistent with definitions employed by other researchers; e.g., the World Bank study of 162 countries by Schneider et al. (2010).
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Acknowledgements
to Dr. Diana Pauna for her valuable assistance in getting in touch with a number of companies explored in this chapter as well as Valters Beldavs and Bronislava Sauka for their helpful advice on questions related to the history of Latvia.
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Sauka, A. (2013). Hidden Champions of Latvia. In: McKiernan, P., Purg, D. (eds) Hidden Champions in CEE and Turkey. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40504-4_15
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