ESTONIA proved yet again that it is among the world’s leading countries when it comes to getting onto lists of the world’s leading countries. This time, the Southern Finns are in with a bullet at number 5 in an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) survey of schoolkids.

Estonia ranks higher than the rest of the Baltic (as usual) and even sneaks ahead of the slack Swedes. North Estonia (aka Finland) came first among the 57 nations surveyed.

LATVIAN householders would be well advised to invest in another woolly jumper and get granny knitting socks for the whole family after Latvijas Gaze announced a price rise for domestic customers of 13 percent from Jan 01 2008.

A figure of 7 percent had previously been quoted. And it won’t stop there - expect similarly-sized (and probably even larger) rises every quarter in 2008 in order to feed the giant appetities of inflation and Gazprom.

LITHUANIA missed the chance to provide even better comic relief than usual when annoyingly-named real estate company inRED (sic) announced healthy profits of LTL 78m, a 42% year-on-year increase.

I’ve got nothing against them personally, but any company with a name as wanky as that deserves to go to the wall, if only so that in the months before the bailiffs arrive, some poor, oppressed sub-editor somewhere will have the pleasure of writing the headline ‘INRED IN THE RED’. If they blow a deal with some trendy retailers perhaps ‘INRED/RED OR DEAD DEAL DEAD’ would provide a few chuckles… at least until the editor spikes it.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.