[/B]Ott Ummelas, Bloomberg News[/B]
A little more than a year ago, the tiny Baltic state of Estonia adopted the euro—at a time when the Greek crisis, and the Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian crises, were exposing the common currency’s weaknesses. Slovakia, another Eastern European state that had joined the euro, was angry that it had to help the Greeks. The Poles and the Czechs were dragging their feet on joining.
Today, Estonia’s economy is the fastest-growing in the currency bloc, consumers and businesses are paying lower interest rates, and business ties with Finland—a euro member state and Estonia’s main trading partner—are tighter than ever. “Lots of Finnish producers seek cooperation partners here now as things are more transparent for them,” says Ermo Saks, owner of an audiovisual production company in the capital of Tallinn, where costs are still 48 percent lower than in Finland.
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