Ten Lost Years

The conclusion is banal indeed. And yes, important indeed.
However, one can argue, that the deepest in the EU contruction of Latvian GDP has followed (and to big extent was a result of) the biggest in the EU GDP growth before 2007. And what happened during the last 10 years – is a substitution of construction and real estate overweighted economy with more sustainable GDP composition, better balanced among industries.
What is more interesting to see is how far the EU (eastern EU in particular) economies has progressed in GDP-per-capita terms since 2001 or 2002, right before easy credit started to flow into those economies. Who managed to turn last 15-16 years into “a catch up western EU living standards” exercise despite booms and busts and booms again and who did not. And why? And are big GDP fluctuations necessarily a bad thing in the longer run GDP expansion.