. SEEDTABLE

November 15th | #50 (wtf!)

This week in Europe: Estonia is like Lord of the Rings

It’s not uncommon in history that a single set of policies (often pushed by a few) turn around the future of an entire country, changing its downward trajectory propelling it into the Big Leagues.

It happened in Asia, where countries like Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan used land redistribution, export and manufacturing and restricted markets to destroy South-East Asia.

The man who defined Korea’s modernisation was General Park Chung Hee, who served as the President of South Korea from 1963 until his assassination in 1979. Starting with building a textile cartel aided by cheap loans, tax exemptions and tariff exemptions of raw materials, Park Chung Hee transformed Korea into an export powerhouse.

In 1962, Korea’s exports were worth $56 million. In 1970, they topped $836 million, and nurtured global powerhouses like Hyundai, Samsung and Daewoo.

His methods (jailing businessmen to comply) might’ve been, ahem, questionable but South Korea’s GDP per capita is now at an all time high of $26,761, up from a record low of $944.30 in 1960.

But we don’t need to look at a president-slash-dictator in Asia sixty yearsago. We can get the same lesson by taking a look at our (frozen) backyard.

Building from the ground-up

Estonia is a small Baltic country of 1.3 million people and four million hectares, half of which is forest.

Aerial view of Tallinn

After setting itself free during the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the country was faced with a challenge: building itself from the ground up.

The country embarked on a series of fast-track reforms to modernize the economy. From the start, it took a digital approach with a program and a series of policies called e-Estonia.

“Estonia was a relatively poor country. Our public sector, our government and our civil servants wanted to offer our people good quality services. We did it straight away digitally because it was simply cheaper, easy.” – Kersti Kaljulaid, President of Estonia

The first big step in digitisation was taken in 1995, when all Estonian schools were wired up to the internet. Then came e-Governance in 1997, the Digital ID in 2002, i-Voting in 2005, e-Health in 2008 and e-Residency in 2014. Now you can do everything, short of getting married, divorced or buying a castle, online.

And it worked