About the project

This database has been created to make various quantitative data about the three Baltic States Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia more accessible to the wider public, for the period 1920-2020. A large part of this data is available not only at the national level, but also at the regional level and within the administrative boundaries that were valid in 2020 (NUTS3 statistical and planning regions). This means that policy planners and implementers, as well as other interested parties, have access to information about long-term development trends in specific regions of the Baltic States. For example, comparing population and age structure, land use and number of farm animals, yields and productivity. Also national and regional gross domestic product per capita. This database will be a good helper for everyone who tries to analyze from a media literacy perspective whether any interpretation of our history is based on facts and data, or can be categorized as disinformation.

Modern statistical databases, which are maintained by national statistical offices or the European-level statistical agency Eurostat, most often offer such information for recent years or, at best, decades. In particular, this can be said about regional statistics. There are objective explanations for this: the borders of the regions have changed relatively often, as well as the accounting methodology. There are time periods and years for which accurate information is not available at all, or significant data differences can be found in different data sources. The situation was also complicated by the half-century-long period of foreign rule in the Baltics, which began during the Second World War in 1940 and ended only in 1990-1991. During this time, a large part of the statistics was not made public and was interpreted according to the political, ideological or economic interests of the particular occupying power.

The main added value of this database is the ability to track long-term development trends. Using all available sources (published and unpublished statistics, archival documents) and various methodologies, scientists from four countries have created this database in three years. Part of the data has been obtained by collecting the available information, summing it up and adjusting it to the modern administrative boundaries with mathematical calculations, while part of the data has been created completely from scratch. This is to the greatest extent applicable to the calculation of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the Baltic States, as well as to the calculation of regional GDP differences in specific years, including the periods of independence and the occupation of the USSR.

For more than 100 years, the saying "there are lies, damned lies and statistics" has been circulating in the world, which the writer Mark Twain attributed to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disarelli (1804 - 1881) at the beginning of the 20th century. Although at the moment we cannot say with certainty that Disarelli really said that, a large enough part of the public even today willingly agrees with the main idea of this saying that statistical data cannot be trusted. We also encountered situations within this project where the huge differences in the various available data raised more questions than answers. For example, the differences in the data available in various sources about the agricultural workers in Latvia could be measured in hundreds of thousands. In the statistical report on work in the Latvian SSR published in 1957, information was provided that in 1956, 39.1 thousand inhabitants were employed in agriculture in Latvia. In the statistical bulletin issued a year later, it was stated that in 1956, 236.5 thousand people were engaged in agriculture in collective farms alone. On the other hand, the 1959 census data showed that the number of people employed in agriculture and forestry in Latvia was 396 thousand, which was more than in industry and construction combined! We had to deal with such situations by carefully evaluating and criticizing the available sources, and taking into account various factors of external influence of the specific time periods.

We recognize that we cannot guarantee 100 percent accuracy either. If it was clear that the differences in the data were in clear contradiction with the course of development of socio-economic and demographic events, we did not include them in the database. Also, the data we have included cannot be considered as absolute truth (because who can be sure that all pigs were counted during the war or after the war, or in collective farms), however, we consider the possible inaccuracy to be relatively small, within a few percent. Thanks to these data, for the first time in the history of the Baltic States, it is possible to track long-term development trends both at the level of the Baltic States and individual regions of the Baltic States. Thanks to these data, we have produced several high-quality scientific publications (see the list of publications) and hope that the availability of the database will encourage other researchers to address these issues.

This database was created within the framework of the project "Quantitative data on social and economic transformations in the regions of the three Baltic states in the last hundred years for the analysis of historical transformations and overcoming future challenges" (No. EEA-RESEARCH-174, 2021-2024). It is one of the projects of the Baltic Research Program, which was financially supported by European Economic Area (EEA) grants. The project was implemented by Vidzeme University, Vilnius University, Tartu University and the Norwegian School of Economics. We thank the funders for the opportunity to make this scientific idea a reality.

Gatis Krūmiņš, Dr. hist., project manager, April 2024.

Project meeting, University of Tartu, June 2022.