Estonia Shows the Strengths and Limits of Small States
The small country has produced an exceptional number of successful startups while its government uses software at the expense of bureaucracy. It still faces unresolved security challenges from Russia.
Estonia is a small country of 1.3 million people situated on the Baltic Sea, sharing land borders only with Latvia and the Russian Federation. Despite being the smallest country to emerge from the fall of communism in Europe in the 1990s, it has been one of the most economically successful since then. Estonia has the highest nominal GDP per capita of any former Soviet republic and has the second-highest GDP per capita in all of the former communist bloc, behind only Slovenia.1 Estonia has also been an early and consistent experimenter with digitization of government bureaucracy and services, has one of the single highest rates of successful tech startups per capita in the world, and is arguably the NATO country most likely to face a direct Russian military threat.
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Adjusted for purchasing power, Estonia’s GDP per capita tripled from 1990 to 2021, a growth rate comparable to Poland’s, and has surpassed both Spain and Japan as of 2022.2 But Estonia’s economy on the whole is not strategically relevant. The country is simply too small to ever be an economic center of gravity, it does not manufacture niche high-tech products like semiconductors, and though it is towards the top of the pack, it does not exceptionally outclass the growth of all the other former communist countries in Europe. Rather, where Estonia has outclassed not just its former communist neighbors, but also the wealthy Nordic countries to which it culturally aspires, is in the elimination of bureaucracy and the nurturing of a globally relevant software sector.
Estonia Installed Computers Instead of Hiring Bureaucrats
Estonia has built an international reputation as a leader in “e-government,” “e-democracy,” or in being a “digital republic.”3 These are vague marketing terms that mix together a grab-bag of different government policies and services, but the core of what they mean for Estonian residents in practice is that there are only two government services you cannot access without a physical presence: marriage and divorce.4 Every other government interaction can be and usually is accomplished online. This includes everything from mundane activities like challenging parking tickets or filing taxes to more sensitive events like voting.
The core of the system is an open-source “data exchange layer” called X-Road. This software essentially makes it possible for disparate organizations to communicate and transfer data between each other securely, while being ultimately governed by a single central authority. Although there is a single authority that determines access to the network, in this case the Estonian government, data itself is kept on the member organizations’ servers and transferred peer-to-peer, in order to prevent the possibility of a single point of failure in the case of a hack. X-Road also logs every time data is accessed and by whom, so that it is not possible to surreptitiously access private data.
As a result of this distributed system, Estonians also have their educational records like grades, medical records like prescriptions, and financial records like income all stored digitally and, importantly, stored in a way that is communicable between different private and public organizations. Following the “once-only principle,” which says that the same piece of information should never be asked for twice, this means Estonians can not only access all services online, but do not need to input their information repeatedly to do so, obviating not just physical presence but also form-filling.
For example, a loan application can automatically pull a person’s information, or the registration of a child’s birth is automatically made, presumably by transmitting hospital data to other government agencies.5 The once-only principle has been partially enshrined in Estonian law since 2007, specifically prohibiting “establishment of separate databases for the collection of the same data.”6 There are reportedly over 52,000 organizations that at least “indirectly” use X-Road and 3000 online services that can be used with it.7 Access to all of these services is secured on the user’s part by an electronic ID tied to an Estonian’s state-issued identity card, which makes it possible for individuals to digitally sign contracts.8
As of late 2023, the digitization of tax filing, medical prescriptions, or a long list of other activities is no longer a futuristic or unusual accomplishment in much of the developed world. Digitization of government is an official goal of the European Union, which ranks Estonia as first in the EU for digital public services and reports that, as of 2022, 92% of Estonians used these digital government services, as did 98% of businesses—compared to EU averages of 75% and 82% respectively.9 Estonia was, however, an early adopter of digitization, developed its software indigenously, and still likely has the single most efficient architecture for digital services; though digitization has become commonplace in the developed world, repeatedly filling out the same information online remains so too.
X-Road was developed in Estonia by Estonians between 1998 and 2001, when it launched. Its development was financed and directed by government bodies, primarily by the Department of State Information Systems (RISO), which was organized under the prime minister’s office at the time. The key figures involved, including Uuno Vallner and Linnar Viik, seem to have all been computer scientists or government advisors with technical educations in Soviet Estonia, Sweden, or Finland.10 Tanel Tammet, credited as one of the main software developers, is a computer scientist and today a professor at Estonia’s technical university. Reportedly the main contractor for development was a company called Cybernetica, which was launched in 1997 by the applied research unit of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Estonian Academy of Sciences.11 This institute was founded in 1960 and played a key role in advancing information technology and electronics research in the Soviet Union. Cybernetica seems to have played a role in Estonia’s more recent government digitization as well.12
In 2001, the RISO was transferred under the Ministry of Transport and Communication and later apparently to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication. In 2011 it was renamed the Estonian Information System Authority (RIA). But its success would likely have been impossible without an apparent wider consensus among Estonian elites that digitization was a legitimate national prestige project, not just a mundane back-office improvement. Estonian cabinet meetings went paperless as early as 2000, using computer terminals instead.13 This indicates digitization was driven fashionably from the top down.
Mart Laar, the first elected prime minister of Estonia after independence, served in office from 1992 to 1994 and then again from 1999 to 2002, during the time when X-Road was introduced. Laar was personally ideologically in favor of free markets and a self-admitted fan of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher; he introduced a flat tax to Estonia as one of his signature policies, a stark contrast to the progressive and heavily-taxed Nordic countries. Laar was also just 32 years old when he first took office and his cabinet, on average, was barely older than him.14 He credits a memo from Raimund Ubar, a computer engineering professor in the Estonian capital city of Tallinn, with persuading him not to “buy anything old” in the field of IT.15
Throughout the 1990s, Estonia’s government bureaucracies were built piecemeal and from scratch, each with limited funds and their own IT infrastructure. But rather than eventually resulting in a disparate array of oppressive and oversized bureaucracies, X-Road connected all these institutions to each other and obviated the need for them to grow past their limits. A confluence of background factors also simply made it easy for Estonian elites and live players to take the path of digitization: a high number of elites with backgrounds in computers, particularly academics, who were newly-introduced to power; the desire to cut ties to the Soviet past and reinvent Estonia as a technologically advanced Western country; an existential distrust of bureaucracy, government, and socialism due to Soviet oppression; and simply the fact that in a small country like Estonia, both elite social networks and bureaucracies will end up being small and thus easier to navigate or reform by individuals.16
Even if successful, digitization strategies in other developed countries are unlikely to result in a decrease in the number of bureaucrats, because such jobs are typically not strictly pragmatic but the results of diverse kinds of political patronage schemes. Estonia’s digitization strategy, however, seems to have in fact resulted in fewer bureaucrats, because it occurred concurrently with the growth of Estonian bureaucracy, rather than after it. According to the Estonian Ministry of Finance, in 2021 the country employed about 28,000 people total in public service, amounting to just 2.9% of the Estonian working-age population and 4% of the Estonian labor force as measured by the World Bank.17 This figure is a decline from 2008, when there were about 29,000 employed civil servants.
For comparison, in 2021, the French civil service employed 5.7 million people, or about 18% of the entire French labor force.18 The French ministries employed about 2 million people, while the Estonian ministries employed just about 3000 in 2008. Assuming these numbers have stayed roughly similar, this means that France employs over ten times more people per capita in its ministries than Estonia does. It is hard to directly compare the numbers of bureaucrats, civil servants, or government workers between countries, simply because the definitions, roles, expectations, privileges, and responsibilities of such positions vary greatly from country to country e.g. whether or not a country counts teachers or medical staff as government-employed.
But taking the broadest measure of government-employed or typically-government-employed workers, Estonia seems to come out ahead, at least in Europe. In 2016, about 23% of Estonia’s workforce was employed in “public administration, defense, education, human health, and social work.”19 This was slightly below the EU average, but far below the shares for Sweden at 34% or Denmark, Belgium, Finland, and France at about 30%. Every single country with a proportion lower than Estonia was either southern or eastern European, with the sole exception of Luxembourg. In other words, Estonia probably has the lowest share of public-sector employees of any northern or western European country.
There is also some evidence that Estonia’s government spends less money as a result. In 2021, government expenditure in Estonia was equivalent to 41.3% of GDP.20 This is relatively low by European standards and significantly lower than any of the Nordic countries, to whose living standards Estonia aspires. For comparison, the figure for Finland was 55.3%. Importantly, Estonia’s public spending is still globally high. For example, the figure for South Korea was 25.8%, for the United Arab Emirates 28.9%, and even for Switzerland it was just 35.0%.
Post-communist countries all had existential needs to reform the political economy of their societies to make returns to socialism impossible. While Poland opted for a form of middle-class, small-business capitalism arguably inspired by Germany or the United States, Estonia opted for a novel and more efficient tech-enabled welfare state. This was arguably inspired by a new form of intellectual techno-optimism, stemming from the libertarian dreams of early internet users that included academics in both Scandinavia and Estonia, that had not theretofore been influential in any government. Unlike bureaucrats, who could be oppressive, corrupt, or Russian, computers would be transparent, fair, and neutral.
Estonia’s Software Sector Overperforms
A unicorn company is commonly defined as a private startup company worth over $1 billion. As of September 2023, Estonia has at least two active unicorn companies, Bolt and Veriff, which would make Estonia the country with the fourth-highest number of unicorns per capita in the world, after only Singapore, Israel, and the United States.21 This however measures only where unicorns are headquartered. If the criteria were broadened to include former unicorns—that are now publicly-traded or were acquired with valuations over $1 billion—as well as companies founded by Estonians, Estonia might well turn out to have the single highest rate of unicorns per capita of any country in the world, adding to the list companies like Skype, Wise, or Pipedrive.
According to data from the OECD, in 2022 Estonia had the fourth-highest total venture capital investment per capita of all the OECD countries worldwide, behind only the U.S., Canada, and Luxembourg.22 Given that Luxembourg is a preferred destination for registering companies but not necessarily where founders come from, what this means is that Estonia likely received more venture investment per capita than any country outside North America, with the possible exception of China. When measuring only seed investment per capita, Estonia is indeed third behind just the U.S. and Canada.
Much of the capital and talent that has contributed to Estonia’s software startup success came from the online video-calling company Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011. Skype’s first two co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, were Danish and Swedish respectively, but the company’s founding software engineers were all Estonian: Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn, and Toivo Annus. Heinla and Friis subsequently co-founded the robotic delivery company Starship Technologies together, which today operates in Tallinn, at over twenty U.S. university campuses, and across a number of metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom. Starship raised over $100 million in early 2022 at an undisclosed valuation.23
Wise, an international money transfer company, went public on the London Stock Exchange through a direct listing in July 2021, and currently has a market capitalization of about $8.7 billion. Co-founder and chairman Taavet Hinrikus was formerly director of strategy at Skype and the company’s first employee. Hinrikus has subsequently become a prolific angel investor with over one hundred investments across a wide range of startups as of 2021.24 His notable investments include the Estonian unicorn Bolt, a competitor to Uber, and Zego, an Estonian commercial vehicle insurer; Hinrikus also sits on Zego’s board. He invests in partnership with Sten Tamkivi, another early executive at Skype. Tamkivi has stated that the number of Estonian tech companies that contain no ex-Skype employees, investors, or advisors is trivial.25
Jaan Tallinn and the other founding software engineers of Skype set up Ambient Sound Investments to hold their stake in the company. The firm has subsequently transitioned into a venture capital and angel investment fund that invests worldwide, but continues to recycle funds back into Estonian startups. The fund lists four different Estonian firms among its notable exits.26 Tallinn is also an active angel and pre-seed investor personally, primarily through his company Metaplanet Holdings. He has a long-standing interest in artificial intelligence and was an early investor in both Google DeepMind and Anthropic. In Estonia itself, his investments include Pactum, a company developing AI software for autonomous negotiations, and Veriff, an identity verification software company, which became another of the country’s unicorns in 2022.27
Skype co-founder Zennström, meanwhile, became founding partner and CEO of Atomico, a London-based venture capital firm that continues to invest primarily in European tech companies, including Pipedrive, an Estonian sales software company and another unicorn.28 Former Pipedrive staff have themselves founded a wide range of startups, while former Wise staff have likewise cycled back into the startup ecosystem. The co-founders of financial technology company Lightyear, based in Tallinn and London, met while working for Wise, while its pre-seed funding came from core members of the early Skype executive team: Hinrikus, Tamkivi, and Jaan Tallinn.
While Estonia’s unicorns to date have all been software companies, the government has ambitions of supporting hardware startups as well. Starship Technologies is to date the country’s most successful robotics company, but it has a presence in batteries and supercapacitors (Skeleton Technologies), 3D imaging (Lightcode Photonics), and military unmanned ground vehicles (Milrem Robotics). The action plan, published by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, aims to double the number of these “deeptech” startups by 2025 and quintuple them by 2030.29 Like software, high-end hardware is R&D-intensive, which contributes positively to national employment and overall economic growth. If Estonia successfully transitions from software to industrial-scale, innovative hardware development, it would be the first country in Eastern Europe to do so.
Estonia’s small population size may have counterintuitively beneficial effects on its startup ecosystem, enabling social connections between founders and investors. It may also help to expand the horizons of its founders: no Estonian CEO could ever think that they will get rich purely by serving the domestic market. Their ambitions must necessarily be international. Of all the EU countries, Estonia has the highest proportion of graduates in information technology at 8.4%.30 It also has the third-highest proportion of information technology workers as a percentage of the total workforce at 6.2%, behind Sweden (8%) and Finland (7%).31 According to EU data, “Information and Communication” was the highest-paid professional sector in Estonia in 2018, even above finance, a distinction shared with some other Eastern European and also Scandinavian countries.32
The Existential Threat From Russia
Like other small states including Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, Estonia faces an existential military threat from an economically and demographically far larger neighbor—Russia. Since being wholly conquered by the Russian Empire in 1721 following the Great Northern War, Estonia has been independent from Moscow only for two periods: the interwar period from 1918 to 1940 and the ongoing period since the fall of communism in 1991. The Estonian government considers itself to be the legal continuation of the interwar republic, with the communist period a military occupation by Russia. Historically, Moscow has invaded the Baltic region variously to secure access to warm-water ports and create a geographical buffer zone against Western powers.
Today, such general geopolitical interests between Russia and Estonia still clash: for example, Estonia remains uncomfortably close to Russia’s second-largest city and port, St. Petersburg, which could be easily blockaded by a navy operating from Estonia or Finland. But the specific existential threat today is not a Russian war of conquest to secure ports, but rather Russian military intervention in Estonia, likely on the premise of defending Estonia’s ethnically Russian minority, or a broader all-out war between Russia and NATO which results in an invasion and occupation of Estonia and the other Baltic states.
According to the Estonian government, as of 2023 the Estonian population of 1.37 million was approximately 68% ethnic Estonians, 22% ethnic Russians, and 10% unknown or other.33 Importantly, just 82% of Estonia’s population had Estonian citizenship and another 2% citizenship from another EU country. The other 16% of the population had non-EU or unspecified citizenship. Ida-Viru county, which borders Russia in the northeast of Estonia, is the only county in Estonia with a majority-Russian population. The urban center of the county is the city of Narva, which is Estonia’s third-largest city and sits right on the border with Russia. As of 2014, only 4% of Narva’s population was Estonian, while 82% was Russian.34 Only 47% had Estonian citizenship at all, while 36% had Russian citizenship.
The rest of Estonia’s Russian population is concentrated in Tallinn. This makes Estonia, along with neighboring Latvia, the only two NATO or EU countries with a substantial ethnic minority of Russians. Most of Estonia’s Russians moved to the country during the Soviet period after World War II, when the ethnically Estonian share of the population dropped from nearly 90% to just over 60% by 1989. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians—and Soviet troops—left Estonia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but just as many remained.
Estonia’s new citizenship laws did not automatically grant citizenship to those who arrived in Estonia after 1940, but allowed for naturalization after a period of residence and proficiency in the Estonian language. The language requirement proved too high a barrier for many of Estonia’s Russians. Though many did end up acquiring Estonian citizenship, many acquired Russian citizenship instead, or simply acquired no citizenship at all and remained stateless while residing long-term in Estonia.35 Generally speaking, most Estonian Russians seem to be politically neutral, with a minority of strong supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin.36
But Russia has repeatedly used the strategy of military intervention against neighboring states under the justification of protecting local Russians, arguably first in Moldova and most notably and recently in Ukraine. Whether a hypothetical intervention into Estonia would take the form of merely giving military aid to local Russian separatists, sending in troops without insignia, or a full-blown invasion, the presence of so many ethnic Russians in Estonia, as well as legal Russian citizens, gives Moscow a potential justification that would play well domestically. The Estonian government has initiated a plan to transition all schooling into the Estonian language, which would affect the 14% of Estonian students still being educated in Russian.37
The Baltic states also geographically separate mainland Russia from the large exclave of Kaliningrad, which sits between Poland and Lithuania. The city of Kaliningrad, which occupies the area of the former Prussian capital of Königsberg, is not just a large city of nearly 1 million people, but a major port and the headquarters of the Russian Navy’s Baltic Fleet. Due to its industry, relatively warm climate, and relative proximity to Western Europe, it has been a notable destination for internal migration within Russia. This means the Baltic states are a potential casualty in case Russia decides it needs to defend Kaliningrad.
In the event of a full-scale conventional war with NATO, the Baltic states as a whole would thus almost certainly be invaded by Russia and would, more likely than not, be successfully occupied at first. In Estonia, conscription is constitutionally mandatory for young men for a period of eight to eleven months.38 But taken together, the Baltic states are only about half the geographical size of Ukraine and at best only one-fifth of the Ukrainian population.
Moreover, they share long land borders with Russia, Russian ally Belarus, or both, and would need to receive aid from the rest of NATO either by sea or through a narrow land corridor between Lithuania and Poland. While the Russian Army has thus far struggled to advance the vast land front in Ukraine since its 2022 invasion, Estonia itself is only as large as the Donbas region in southeast Ukraine. Any Russian invasion of Estonia, no matter how unsuccessful, carries a significant risk of ethnic cleansing against the relatively small Estonian population.
Estonia joined both the European Union and NATO in 2004. In principle, this should neutralize the existential threat from Russia due to the threat of a nuclear war between Russia and NATO should Russia attack Estonia. Russia has never attacked a NATO member state. But Estonians remain understandably anxious about the strength of this deterrence. NATO’s collective defense clause remains essentially untested in practice. A full-scale Russian invasion of Estonia could result in a NATO response, but one limited to liberating Estonian territory and which would not prevent vast damage to Estonia’s economy or outright wartime atrocities against the Estonian people. If Estonia’s Russian minority decided to take up arms against the Estonian government and clandestinely received military support from Russia, it is unclear how NATO would respond, nor how Moscow would respond if such a rebellion were, in turn, successfully put down by force.
Estonia Can Reinvent Itself Once More
In 2014, the Estonian government launched its “e-residency” program, which allows anyone in the world to register an Estonian company online and make use of Estonia’s digital government services, after being approved. As Estonian companies, these e-registered companies have access to the EU, though the program does not provide any rights to physical residency in or travel to either Estonia or the EU. These e-registered companies are obligated to pay Estonian corporate taxes, as well as, likely, foreign corporate taxes incurred due to physical and tax residency outside of Estonia. The government however advertises a 0% tax on reinvested profits or annual income, just a 14%-20% tax on distributed profits.39 Personal income from Estonian companies is taxed at 20% and other payroll or social taxes may apply.
There are reportedly over 16,000 e-resident companies and over 84,000 e-residents.40 In the first half of 2023, these companies employed about 5000 local Estonians and generated €37.7 million in tax revenues for the government—the goal is to raise this to €100 million soon.41 The government’s marketing materials claim that e-residency has helped some Estonian unicorn companies grow.42 While being another innovation in digitization of government bureaucracy and a profitable government service, the e-residency program is not yet close to transforming the Estonian economy. For comparison, the 2022 Estonian government budget was about €13 billion.43
What is notable about the e-residency program is that it signals Estonia’s “digital republic” is moving in a new direction: rather than eliminating paperwork or standing in lines to catapult Estonia from Soviet backwardness to the forefront of the future, the focus is now on “creating a borderless digital society for global citizens.”44 The e-residency program’s marketing materials say that the program is ideally suited for freelancers, consultants, and “digital nomads.”45 Taavi Kotka, one of the co-creators of the program, described his rationale as increasing the population of Estonia for economic reasons by simply rethinking what population was; rather than physical, a digital population.46
Estonia has also been rethinking what a government is. In 2017, Estonia finalized a treaty with Luxembourg that created the first-ever “data embassy.”47 In short, the Estonian government has set up a secure data center in Luxembourg that runs servers with backups of Estonian government data, and the government of Luxembourg has agreed to recognize this center and the data it communicates as sovereign Estonian territory or property with diplomatic immunity from local laws, like any other embassy.48 The purpose of this system is to provide a digital fallback in case Estonia’s government is hit with a debilitating cyberattack, as infamously happened in 2007 by presumably Russian attackers. Estonia hopes to open more such data embassies and expects other countries to eventually set up their own as well.49
The endpoint of this new direction is no longer just digitization of bureaucracy, but virtualization of both government and population. This type of thinking, which imagines “network states” with opt-in citizenship based on ideological or business affinities rather than birthplace or ethnic ties, has long been popular in Silicon Valley and the wider global tech sector, which has likely contributed to Estonia’s interest in it. But in Estonia’s case, a digital society is not a replacement for the territorial nation-state, but rather a very important backup for it in the case of a territorial invasion from Russia.
In the view of the Estonian defense ministry, “Russia is not any different” from Putin, because “the imperialist mindset is historically rooted in Russia” and “Russia has never been a democratic country and is unlikely to become one.”50 Russia is not a rational actor, but is extremely hostile and is “[susceptible] to miscalculation,” which means that the nuclear deterrent of NATO might fail to have its intended effect on Moscow. In October 2022, the Estonian parliament voted to declare Russia a “terrorist state.”51 In April 2023, the commander of the Estonian military said that “Russia should no longer be a great and powerful country that feels it has the right to do whatever it wants” and that “Russia should dissolve into smaller countries with less power and ambition.”52
The Estonian defense ministry wants NATO to station a large number of conventional forces on Estonian territory to create a conventional deterrent, not just a nuclear one. As of September 2023, the U.S. has about 600 troops based in Estonia equipped with HIMARS artillery systems.53 This number was increased from a negligible presence in late 2022 in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier that year. Given the scale of warfare in Ukraine, this number would likely have to increase by at least two orders of magnitude to represent the kind of overwhelming deterrent that Estonia wants. Estonian saber-rattling is likely not intended to signal a direct offensive threat to Russia itself, but rally Estonians for the possibility of a civil war or even total war for survival.
Were Estonia to be invaded and occupied by Russia, its digitized government and data embassy would allow Estonian society to flee the territory of Estonia while otherwise preserving itself. Estonia has backed up its court records, land registry, database of persons, and more.54 While governments-in-exile have existed before, such a system could allow Estonia to run the first-ever tax-base-in-exile over the internet, and thus not just a top-level elite that can swoop in when territory is regained, but the actual tax-collecting engine of a state that allows it to coordinate vast numbers of people and fund projects in the collective interest.
This however answers the question of why such an online and location-independent tax-base doesn’t already exist, even though it has long been technically feasible: because location-dependent states would conclusively obstruct it, absent spending some vast pile of political capital recognized as legitimate by them. But this actually means there may be a viable path to building virtual states after all, if such political capital can only be acquired. Estonia shows that, rather than being built out of online social groups or blockchain governance, a virtual state could be built out of treaties, on top of the legacy territorial states, rather than in place of them. Counterintuitively, it is thus the Estonian government that is the furthest ahead on innovation in governance with new technology, and likely the best-poised to make further advancements. Should Estonia’s experimentation result in a new kind of state, this would be an innovation in social technology that would not just be Estonia reinventing itself, but potentially revolutionize small states worldwide, if not even large states too.
“GDP per Capita (Current US$).” World Bank Open Data, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true.
See here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true; See here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=chart&stackMode=relative&country=POL~VNM~KOR~MAR~IND~DEU~CZE~HUN~UKR~RUS~TUR~SWE~FRA~GBR~SVN~USA~ROU~EST~LTU~ITA~ESP~LVA~BLR~HRV~SVK~MNE~MDA~LUX
Nathan Heller, “Estonia, the Digital Republic,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic.
“Estonia - a fully digitised nation,” e-Estonia, June 3, 2022, https://e-estonia.com/estonia-a-fully-digitised-nation.
Nathan Heller, “Estonia, the Digital Republic,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic ; Danica Kirka, “Digitally enhanced: Estonia plots the end of bureaucracy,” Phys.org, December 26, 2018, https://phys.org/news/2018-12-digitally-estonia-plots-bureaucracy.html.
“Public Information Act,” Riigi Teataja, 15 November 2000, https://www.riigiteataja.ee/en/eli/514112013001/consolide.
“X-Road,” e-Estonia, https://e-estonia.com/solutions/interoperability-services/x-road.
“ID-card,” e-Estonia, https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/id-card.
“Estonia in the Digital Economy and Society Index,” European Commission, September 16, 2022, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/desi-estonia.
“X-Road History — X-Road Data Exchange Layer,” X-Road, https://x-road.global/xroad-history.
“Our Story,” Cybernetica, April 14, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190414022945/https://cyber.ee/about-us/our-story.
See here: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/data-embassy/
“Organisation and planning of the work of the Government,” Riigikantselei, https://riigikantselei.ee/en/supporting-government-and-prime-minister/organisation-and-planning-work-government.
Peeter Vihma, “What's behind Estonia's digital success?” e-Estonia, January 22, 2020, https://e-estonia.com/whats-behind-estonias-digital-success.
Ines Mergel, “Estonia's Digital Transformation: Mission Mystique and the Hiding HandMission Mystique and the Hiding Hand,” ResearchGate, April 26, 2023, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336782878_Estonia's_Digital_Transformation_Mission_Mystique_and_the_Hiding_HandMission_Mystique_and_the_Hiding_Hand.
Ibid.
“Public Administration,” Rahandusministeerium, June 20, 2022, https://www.fin.ee/en/state-local-governments-spatial-planning/public-administration-and-personnel-policy/public.
“Labor force, total France,” Worldbank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN?locations=FR; “In 2021, employment increased by 0.4% in the French civil service - Informations rapides - 338,” Insee, December 16, 2022, https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/6680535.
“Which sector is the main employer in the EU Member States?” European Commission, October 24, 2017, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20171024-1.
“Public Finances in Modern History - Government expenditure, percent of GDP,” International Monetary Fund, https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND.
“The Complete List Of Unicorn Companies,” CB Insights, https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies.
“Venture capital investments (market statistics),” OECD, August 3, 2023, https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?tm=venture%20capital%20investments&pg=0&snb=2&vw=ov&df[ds]=dsDisseminateFinalDMZ&df[id]=DSD_VC%40DF_VC_INV&df[ag]=OECD.SDD.TPS&df[vs]=1.0&pd=2022%2C2022&dq=...USD_EXC.A&ly[rw]=BUSINESS_DEVELOPMENT_STAGE&ly[rs]=REF_AREA&t.
David Edwards. “Starship Technologies Raises $100 Million iin 30 Days as Demand for Delivery Robots Skyrockets,” Robotics and Automation, March 3, 2022, https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2022/03/03/starship-technologies-raises-100-million-in-30-days-as-demand-for-delivery-robots-skyrockets/49676.
Isabel Woodford, “Inside Taavet Hinrikus's Vast Angel Portfolio,” Sifted, February 23, 2021, https://sifted.eu/articles/inside-taavet-fund.
Sten Tamkivi, “12/Estonia has of course been the clearest benefactor. In our now bustling tech industry companies which do _not_ have any Skype related founders, investors, early advisors or key employees is a rounding error,” X,
https://twitter.com/seikatsu/status/1703676037987520850
.
“Venture Capital — Ambient Sound Investments,” Ambient Sound Investments, https://asi.ee/asset/venture-capital.
“Veriff Raises $100 Million and Becomes Estonia’s Ninth Unicorn,” Invest in Estonia, https://investinestonia.com/veriff-raises-100-million-and-becomes-estonian-ninth-unicorn.
“Our Investment in Pipedrive: putting salespeople in the driver's seat,” Atomico, January 18, 2017, https://atomico.com/insights/our-investment-in-pipedrive-putting-salespeople-in-the-drivers-seat.
University of Tartu, “Estonia aims to boost deep-tech start-up entrepreneurship”, Science Business Network, March 23, 2023, https://sciencebusiness.net/network-updates/university-tartu-estonia-aims-boost-deep-tech-start-entrepreneurship
“Estonia in the Digital Economy and Society Index,” European Commission, September 16, 2022, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/desi-estonia.
Ibid.
“Share of Government Employment Nearly Stable,” The European Economy Since the Start of the Millennium, 2022, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/digpub/european_economy/bloc-4d.html?lang=en.
“Population Figure,” Statistikaamet, https://www.stat.ee/en/find-statistics/statistics-theme/population/population-figure.
“Narva in Figures,” Narva, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20140707131610/http://www.narva.ee/files/7095.pdf.
Tacita Vero, “Many Ethnic Russians in Estonia Have “Gray Passports,” Live in Legal Limbo,” Slate Magazine, March 13, 2017, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/many-ethnic-russians-in-estonia-have-gray-passports-live-in-legal-limbo.html.
Pekka Vanttinen, “Russian Minority in Estonia Turns its Back on Putin,” EURACTIV, March 22, 2022, https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/russian-minority-in-estonia-turns-its-back-on-putin.
“Conscript Service,” Estonian Defence Forces, June 9, 2022, https://mil.ee/en/defence-forces/compulsory-military-service.
“Estonia's e-Residency program reports €40 million in state revenue,” ERR News, August 31, 2023, https://news.err.ee/1609084046/estonia-s-e-residency-program-reports-40-million-in-state-revenue
Nathan Heller, “Estonia, the Digital Republic,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic
The full treaty can be read here: https://www.riigiteataja.ee/aktilisa/2280/3201/8002/Lux_Info_Agreement.pdf
According to the OECD. See here: https://www.oecd.org/gov/innovative-government/Estonia-case-study-UAE-report-2018.pdf
“Russia's War in Ukraine: Myths and Lessons,” Kaitseministeerium, February 2, 2023, https://kaitseministeerium.ee/sites/default/files/myths_and_lessons_0.pdf.
Tristan Fiedler, “Estonian Parliament Declares Russia a Terrorist State,” Politico, October 18, 2022, https://www.politico.eu/article/as-the-third-country-to-estonia-declares-russia-a-terrorist-state.
Anu Välba, “EDF Head: Russia Should Dissolve into Many Small Countries with Less Power,” ERR, April 27, 2023, https://news.err.ee/1608961640/edf-head-russia-should-dissolve-into-many-small-countries-with-less-power.
“US military personnel based in Estonia now number around 600,” ERR, September 9, 2023, https://news.err.ee/1609095179/us-military-personnel-based-in-estonia-now-number-around-600.