Juuse, Egert - "Latin Americanization" of The Estonian Economy - Institutional Analysis of Financial Fragility and The Financialization Process

Journal of Post Keynesian Economics
ISSN: 0160-3477 (Print) 1557-7821 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mpke20
“Latin Americanization” of the Estonian economy:

institutional analysis of financial fragility and the
financialization process
Egert Juuse
To cite this article: Egert Juuse (2015) “Latin Americanization” of the Estonian economy:
institutional analysis of financial fragility and the financialization process, Journal of Post
Keynesian Economics, 38:3, 399-425, DOI: 10.1080/01603477.2015.1070270
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01603477.2015.1070270
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Download by: [Flinders University of South Australia] Date: 09 February 2016, At: 08:52
Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 38:399–425, 2015
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN 0160-3477 print / 1557-7821 online
DOI: 10.1080/01603477.2015.1070270
EGERT JUUSE
Downloaded by [Flinders University of South Australia] at 08:52 09 February 2016
“Latin Americanization” of the Estonian

economy: institutional analysis of
financial fragility and the
financialization process
Abstract: By drawing on the tradition of institutionalism and the Minsky–

Kregel framework on sovereign financial systems, the paper discusses the nat-
ure of and the institutional factors behind financial fragility in Estonia within
a wider financialization phenomenon. The study reveals the emergence of two
interrelated manifestations of the financialization process in Estonia in the
form of increased international inequality in favor of foreign actors, accruing
from cross-border investment activity, and higher debt burden of the house-
hold sector against the accumulation of savings in the economy as a whole.
Institutionally, these developments have been supported by the embeddedness
of the Washington Consensus policies. Given the lack of intervention in the
economy by means of either prudential capital account controls or specific
foreign direct investment policies, the result has been a heavy reliance on
foreign capital in both the financial and nonfinancial sectors. Furthermore,
the privatization process and recurring banking failures associated with the
transition process have created a particular historical context in terms of
institutional arrangements and idiosyncratic elements that laid the ground-
work for deteriorating internal and external imbalances in the economy.
Key words: financial fragility, financialization, foreign direct investments,

institutions, transition economies
Egert Juuse is junior research fellow at the Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation
and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology. The research leading to these
results was supported by funding from the European Union Seventh Framework
Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 266800.
399
400 JOURNAL OF POST KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS
Estonia has been portrayed as a poster child not only in terms of

adhering to a neoliberal agenda in its catching-up process but also
in dealing with the consequences of the global financial crisis of
2008. During its reindependence period of twenty-four years,
Estonia has not practiced extensive intervention in the economy
beyond fiscal reforms for the purpose of macroeconomic stability.
Such conservatism, manifested in a fixed exchange rate regime and
flat tax system, has been accompanied by a rapid annual real

growth rate of 8.7 percent between 2000 and 2007 and almost a
tenfold increase in gross domestic product (GDP) at nominal
prices from 1994 to 2007 (Kuum, 2010, p. 48). However, increasing
external debt levels and widening current account deficits have at
the same time weakened the economy’s foundations. In light of
these adversarial developments in an extremely open economy,
the present study seeks to understand the institutional factors
behind the increasing fragility of the economy, that is, broadening
internal and external imbalances. More specifically, the paper
looks at how particular policies have rendered the economy finan-
cially vulnerable during the twenty-four-year period of reindepen-
dence and therefore, in line with the insights from the German
historical school, endeavors to “underscore the importance of sen-
sitivity to specific cultural and historical circumstances in econ-
omic analysis” (Raudla, 2014, p. 3). On that account, Estonia is
a good example for understanding the implications of a transition
from the socialist socioeconomic system to the capitalist mode
within a specific political and institutional context. Moreover, con-
sidering the particular historical context, it is possible to follow the
interplay between the transition process and the broader financia-
lization phenomenon during a relatively short span of time, com-
pared to the decades-long evolution of financial systems in
advanced industrial economies.
By drawing on the historical institutionalist tradition (Pollitt,
2008, 2012), “snapshots” relating to critical junctures, that is, insti-
tutional and political factors that have a significant explanatory
power for understanding paradigmatic shifts, will be presented by
relying on the secondary (meta-)analysis method, whereas
statistical evidence reveals general patterns in the economy. For
instance, the outset of pre-accession negotiations for European
Union (EU) membership or mass privatization can be considered
as critical junctures in institutional adaptation. This investigation
of historical context and institutional arrangements is important
“LATIN AMERICANIZATION” OF THE ESTONIAN ECONOMY 401
for understanding the ensuing economic processes. Hence, on

a theoretical level, the study contributes to institutional analysis
within different scholarly approaches such as the dependency
theory (e.g., Prebisch, 1950; Singer, 1950), classical development
economics (e.g., Nurkse, 2011a; Rosenstein-Rodan, 1961) or post-
Keynesian tradition (e.g., Kregel, 2004; Minsky, 1992; Wray, 2006),
which address the issue of macroeconomic financial (in)stability.
Minsky–Kregel framework and financalization

Notwithstanding the different aspects that various schools within
the heterodox economics tradition have underlined, the primary
mechanism behind socioeconomic development, particularly in
catching-up transition economies, is deemed to be the integrated
production structures with demand linkages, that is, balanced
investments made in horizontally diversified and mutually support-
ing industries, which enlarge the size of the market and increase real
income per capita (Nurkse, 2011a, pp. 107–121; Nurkse, 2011b,
pp. 329–338). The core issue, however, is related to the financing
aspect of investments that reveals opposing positions in the finance
and development literature. In the orthodox, neoclassical tradition,
foreign capital is seen as a solution to deficient domestic savings
in developing countries (Perkins et al., 2006, pp. 393–397). The
explanation for the flow of capital from developed to developing
countries rests on the argument that developing countries have
higher prospective rates of return on investment than more
developed economies, which in line with the efficient markets
hypothesis, should incentivize the movement of capital to develop-
ing countries. The heterodox school, on the other hand, sees
the mobilization of domestic resources as a precondition of
development and neglects the importance of external funds for
development (Kalecki, 1993; Nurkse, 2011a; Prebisch 1950).1
Conceptually, this could be reasoned based on Minsky’s (1992)
analysis on financing positions, which if extended to the country
level, discloses the conditions of financial fragility for (monetarily
nonsovereign) countries and enables us to see how the embedded
1
Theoretically, external financing can contribute to sustainable development
by financing investments in competitive manufacturing export industries through
balanced growth with the establishment of backward and forward demand
linkages that would improve the balance of payments position and ensure a
long-term debt sustainable development pattern (Kregel, 2004, pp. 11–13).
structural patterns are related to the financial sustainability of the

economy. Minsky’s hedge profile for a country entails sufficient
external earnings from surplus on goods and services to cover debt
commitments, while a Ponzi position implies insufficient trade sur-
pluses to service net capital factor payments, if outstanding liabil-
ities are denominated in a foreign currency (Kregel, 2004; 2006,
p. 18; see also Wray, 2006, pp. 17, 24–25). In the context of growing
foreign liabilities, both the notion of an enclave economy (Galla-

gher and Zarsky, 2007; Nurkse, 2011a, pp. 157–163) and the Pre-
bisch–Singer thesis (Singer, 1950; Toye and Toye, 2003) provide
an explanation for increased susceptibility to a Ponzi profile.
Namely, by extending a lender’s economy to a host economy, devel-
oping economies become unable to repay debt due to a detrimental
position in the international division of labor and the deteriorating
terms of trade. Hence, overall financial fragility at the country level
implies a heavy indebtedness of the economy with decreasing mar-
gins of safety (Minsky, 1991, 1992). In principle, the dynamics of
externally financed economies are consistent with the logic behind
the credit-driven business cycle with two succeeding phases (Palley,
2001): the period of increasing expenditures, incomes, and demand
due to the availability of cheap credit, which is followed by a period
of contraction, as loans are to be repaid, that is, the transfers of
income from debtors to creditors outweigh the expansionary
impact of new loans, causing increased debt burden, constrained
investment possibilities, and decreased incomes. The extent of the
fluctuations during these stages, however, depends on macroeco-
nomic policies as institutional ceilings and floors that constrain
the instability (Ferri and Minsky, 1991; Thabet, 2006). In line with
Minsky’s financial fragility hypothesis, “the need is for . . . authority
for the financial system that accepts that financing development
opens the system to losses. . . . The problem therefore is to provide
for protecting . . . from the consequences of the losses which may
ensue from development financing” (Minsky, 1994, p. 3).
In historical perspective, both increasing financial fragility and
cyclicality have been inherent elements of a capitalist system in
general, whereas during the latest stage of capitalist development
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, disequili-
brating developments on both the micro and macro levels have
been associated with the financialization process that reflects the
propositions of Minsky–Kregel analysis (Minsky, 1996; see also
Wray [2009] on money manager capitalism as an equivalent to
the notion of financialization). Aside from a typical increase in the

debt level of the private sector due to credit-led investments and
consumption, the common characteristics of this phenomenon
include among others the deregulation of the financial sector, an
increase in financial investments and incomes, and shareholder
value orientation (Palley, 2007; Stockhammer 2004). In general,
financialization is conceived of the proliferation of financial
markets and innovations that have contributed to increasing

reliance on the debt-led growth strategy either domestically or in
the cross-border dimension. At the micro level, financialization pro-
cesses have contributed to the emergence of the latest—sixth—stage
in banking evolution, which introduced securitization (see Chick
[1993] on the stages approach). However, all these developments
under the financialization notion need to be seen as embedded in
the particular institutional environment that has either supported
or constrained the realization of its manifestations. For instance,
one could see the securitization process within the broader financia-
lization phenomenon as a response to and an impact of financial
policies. This brings forth the institutional aspect of economic
analysis, particularly when trying to understand the impact of
radical reforms on financing patterns in a transition economy.
For developing and transition economies alike, the most impor-
tant institutional anchors in recent history have been development
policies—Washington Consensus (WC)—promulgated by the lead-
ing international financial institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which have high-
lighted the importance of capital flows from developed to develop-
ing countries with the emphasis on foreign direct investments (FDI)
(Kregel, 2004; Ocampo et al., 2007). However, it has not been
recognized that FDI is a form of debt that needs to be repaid,
and the ability of an economy to service the debt is determined
by the economic and financial foundations of a host country. In this
regard, financial stability under the outward-looking development
strategy is primarily affected by the structural pattern of the
economy, but no less by the macroeconomic and prudential time-
varying financial policies (UNCTAD, 1998). Hence, without targeted
FDI policies and countercyclical measures, reliance on external capital
worsens the imbalances and leaves developing economies exposed to
both negative net flows and unsustainable debt creation, which
renders them prone to financial crises (Kregel, 2004; Ocampo et al.,
2007 UNCTAD, 2003, i–xiii).
Growth induced in Estonia by foreign savings

Estonia is one of the best examples of a country that finances its
development with foreign capital. By the end of 1997, it was among
the top three Central and East European (CEE) countries accord-
ing to the inward FDI stock per capita. While the inward FDI stock
in GDP stood at 46.6 percent in 2000, it increased to 73.4 percent by
2008 (Hunya, 2009, p. 32). More significant change, however, has
taken place in the allocation of inward FDI. In the early 1990s,

the financial sector ranked only fourth in the share of annual
FDI inflows, whereas the manufacturing industry absorbed most
of the foreign capital. By 2008, the FDI stock in the FIRE (finance,
insurance, and real estate) sector had taken the leading position
among economic activities (see Figure 1).
This change in the allocation of foreign capital, which resulted in
the acquisition of nearly all Estonian commercial banks by foreign
investors, also affected the change in the pattern of capital inflows.
Starting with FDI and long-term government loans in the early
1990s, other forms of foreign capital inflows such as loans, cur-
rency, and deposits as well as portfolio investments also increased
their share during the 2000s. Over a nine-year span before the
2008 crisis, the volume of foreign loan and deposit liabilities grew
nearly sevenfold (see Figure 2). Following positive net capital flows
until 2008, the net total external debt of the economy grew from
17.6 percent of GDP in 1996 to 54.3 percent in 2008 before turning
Figure 1 Direct investment positions in Estonia by fields of activity,

2006 (% of total inward FDI stock)
Source: Author’s calculations based on data from Eesti Pank, 2015.

Figure 2 Capital inflows, net external debt, and international investment

position in Estonia, 1993–2014 (% of GDP)
negative in 2012 (author’s calculation based on Eesti Pank, 2015),

even though the private sector has continuously been a net debtor
against the rest of the world.
In light of a heavy reliance on foreign savings in both the
financial and nonfinancial sectors as well as factors related to a
transition economy (see below), the links between the Estonian
domestic financial sector and the productive part of the economy
were gradually weakened. In the 1990s, bank loans to the nonfinan-
cial corporate sector overwhelmingly dominated the banks’ asset
portfolio, even though the volume of issued loans was relatively
low—around 25 percent of GDP in the late 1990s (OECD, 2000).
In the 2000s, however, the distribution of loans to private persons
and the corporate sector evened out, in spite of the increased use
of bank credit by the corporate sector (see Figure 3).
As Figure 3 shows, during the 2000s, an increasing share of
banking assets was channeled to meet the credit demand of the
household and real estate sectors. Over 40 percent of the loans to
nonfinancial companies consisted of real estate and construction
loans, and coupled with mortgage loans, the share was even
higher—over 60 percent of the banks’ credit portfolio in 2009.
The main contributor in the growth of loans to households was
mortgage lending—over a ten-year span, outstanding housing
loans grew from 4.5 percent of GDP in 2000 to 43.7 percent in
2009 and the ratio of debt to disposable income grew from 8 percent
Figure 3 The composition of banks’ loan portfolio at year-end,

1997–2014 (% of GDP)
in 1996 to 104 percent in 2009 (author’s calculations based on Eesti

Pank [2015] and OECD [2015]). This indicates that although real
estate was one of the most dynamic sectors in the 2000s, the collapse
of the real estate boom in 2008 engendered dire consequences
for the whole economy—drop in growth by 14 percent due to the
drying up of investments and consumption; soaring unemployment
and bankruptcies; and deteriorating creditworthiness of borrowers
(Eesti Pank, 2010).
Aside from fueling the real estate boom, positive net capital
inflows entailed the deterioration of the current account balance
throughout the years until 2009, which again turned negative in
2012 after three years of positive balance. Yet, the trade account
has been positive since 2009, revealing the vulnerability of the
economy in terms of increasing investment-related income outflows
on the income account (see Figure 4).
Hence, with cross-border private capital inflows that have
shrunk since the 2008 crisis, growing external debt stock has predis-
posed Estonia to a Ponzi financing position, that is, the inability to
cover the service of negative net capital factor with foreign currency
earnings from the surplus on the trade and services account.
In addition to cross-border external imbalances, the economy,
primarily the private sector, also suffered from internal imbalances
that resulted from the fact that households and businesses took
more leveraged positions in the 2000s, as indicated above. These
Figure 4 Current account balance in Estonia, 1993–2014 (% of GDP)

disequilibrating trends in the Estonian economy made the situation

especially fragile due to severe financial constraints, attested to by
the fixed exchange rate system and the denomination of external
liabilities in foreign currency until 2011, when Estonia joined the
Eurozone (see Wray [2006] on the United States as an opposite
case). Thus, the monetary regime along with other key institutional
factors enables us to interpret the presented dynamics from the his-
torical and evolutionary perspectives since the grounds for the
development path of Estonia were established in the early 1990s
and were further reinforced by the succeeding reforms and the insti-
tutional transformation of the socioeconomic environment. Conse-
quently, the following sections will attempt to determine where the
seeds for increasing financial fragility in Estonia were planted and
to elaborate on the reasons why housing finance gained such
momentum in the Estonian economy at the turn of the millennium,
that is, which institutional preconditions were met for expanding
both internal and external imbalances.
Neoliberalism, privatization, and openness to foreign capital

Even though the political, economic, and social structures of the
Soviet heritage were destroyed in the 1990s, the adopted reform
agenda in turn set off forces that led to the breakdown of the real
economy. Instead of a step-by-step approach, the restructuring
was undertaken mainly in the form of shock therapy by
implementing macroeconomic reforms and also a liberalization

agenda, which changed the composition of the economy relatively
rapidly (Hannula and Tamm, 2002; Purju, 2000). From 1992
onward, governments endeavored to attract FDI by abolishing
restrictions on capital account transactions already by 1994 and
by implementing liberal macroeconomic policies, such as a low
tax base, flat tax rates, and a balanced government budget for
the purpose of price and macroeconomic stability (Khoury and

Wihlborg, 2006; Purju, 2004). The political rhetoric since the
beginning of the independence period has reinstated the need to fill
the savings gap with foreign capital because development has been
conceived as saving constrained. Subject to this mainstream
approach, Estonia has sympathized with monetarist principles by
relying on market-based self-adjustment mechanisms and control-
ling the money supply through a currency board arrangement.
Hence, institutionally, the strategy of foreign savings-led economic
development was built on a currency board system that was
supposed to attract foreign investors by providing a guarantee
for the stability of the exchange rate (Bernhardtson and Billborn,
2010; OECD, 2000). This openness of the economy reflected the
aspiration of governments to adopt policies from the Washington
Consensus toolbox as well as the European Union, because these
were perceived as “Western standards.”2
Aside from the enabling factors mentioned, foreign capital was
directly attracted through mass privatization in the 1990s because
the strategy favored strategic (foreign) investors.3 By 1992, the
advantages of insider owners were removed in order to broaden
the possibilities for foreigners to participate in the privatization
2
The high degree of financial liberalization in terms of capital account and
financial sector liberalization was an essential part of the process of accession
to the EU. In particular, the signing of the Europe Agreement in 1995 and the
Free Trade Agreement with the EU in 1994 required external liberalization in
terms of opening its financial markets to foreign banks and financial institutions
after 1999 for further integration. The Europe Agreement stipulated that
Estonian and the EU’s credit institutions had the right to commence their
activities in each other’s territory on equal terms with domestic credit institutions.
One of the core provisions was the free movement of payments, investments, and
other capital and also the obligation that Estonia will not impose restrictions on
the movement of capital (Eesti Pank, 1996).
3
The privatization process in the early 1990s was deliberately targeting foreign
investors by implementing the Treuhand model, that is, selling state-owned assets
to strategic investors, which explains the key role of foreign investors in the pri-
vatization process and high FDI inflows (OECD, 2000; Purju, 1996).
process. The effect of the privatization of state-owned businesses,

which in essence dismantled large dominating production
complexes in the manufacturing and agriculture sectors (Purju,
2000), was more significant on bank–industry relations. Specifi-
cally, the Estonian economy emerged with the proliferation of
small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), which entailed both
new and different financing patterns and challenges in comparison
with large corporations. Because the privatization policy targeted

strategic investors, the result was a high concentration of owner-
ship in the hands of foreign (but also domestic) investors, in parti-
cular as of 1994, when the privatization vouchers were made freely
tradable—up to 50 percent of the purchase price of a privatized
entity could be paid for with vouchers (OECD, 2000). A qualifying
holding gave owners a prerogative in making decisions on the pay-
ment of dividends as well as on the sale of the company, which is
an important advantage, given that only dividends can guarantee
sufficient returns on investments under conditions in which lagging
development of the capital market has limited the possibilities to
sell shares or profit from price appreciation (Pajuste and Olsson,
2001; Postma and Hermes, 2002). This explains why businesses
were reluctant to be influenced by external actors, such as banks.
As a result, a significant share of the investments by the nonfinan-
cial sector was financed by retained earnings and, in the case of
multinational enterprises, by intracompany and banking loans,
including loans from overseas banks (Kõomägi and Sander,
2006) (see Figure 5 below).
Bank financing was also discouraged by new businesses having
found a niche in commerce, services, and so on, but not so much
in production. At the same time, the structure of productive capital
was rendered less capital intensive, which indicated a low mechan-
ization of the work and thus a high rate of manual labor (Raudsepp
et al., 2003). Therefore, in light of the overall restructuring of the
economy in the 1990s, which entailed delinking processes, dualism
of the economy, and primitivization of the productive base in terms
of industrial decline (Reinert and Kattel, 2007; Tiits et al., 2008),
Estonia was faced with a Schumpeterian creative destruction pro-
cess, albeit without the creative part, which impaired the demand
for bank or market-based financing. The specialization of the Esto-
nian economy without significant high-technology sectors accounts
for the almost total lack of progress on the local venture capital
market. Existing investment and private equity companies have
Figure 5 Economic indicators of the nonfinancial corporate sector and

credit institutions, 1994–2014 (% of GDP)
Source: Author’s calculations based on data from Eesti Pank, 2015, and Statistics
Estonia, 2015.
preferred growth-stage investments rather than risky start-up

investments, and have expanded their investment activities outside
of Estonia in the CEE region and beyond (Sander and Kõomägi,
2007). As regards market-based financing, FDI largely replaced
capital markets in providing corporate financing in the 1990s and
the acquisition of Estonian enterprises by foreigners further weak-
ened the position of securities markets in the financial system (Eesti
Pank, 1999; Deutsche Bundesbank, 2003).
A neoliberalist stance in terms of monetary orthodoxy, openness
to foreign capital, and the adoption of a privatization strategy also
affected the developments in the banking sector, whereas the effects
resulting from several rounds of banking crises in the 1990s cannot
be underestimated either. To some extent, these features of the
Estonian (political) economy of two decades ago gave rise to a
peculiar evolutionary pattern in the banking industry, if addressed
from a stage-based approach, insofar as all phases of the banking
development elaborated by Chick (1993) could not be witnessed
from the onset of Estonia’s banking in the early 1990s. In principle,
local banking skipped several stages and reached the fifth stage—
attracting wholesale deposits to support expansion—relatively
quickly through the takeover of the banking industry by foreigners
in the late 1990s, which enabled augmenting the reserves of the sys-
tem from capital inflows, that is, cross-border lending by parent
banks. As a result of mergers and acquisitions by foreign investors,
the four largest foreign-owned banks gained control over 95 percent

of the market in terms of both total assets and share capital
(Financial Supervision Authority, 2014). Before the acquisitions,
three episodes of the banking crisis in the 1990s severely under-
mined the trustworthiness of the banking sector, which discouraged
households from depositing in banks and accepting bank liabilities,
which is characteristic of the first and second stages, respectively. In
this regard, one has to bear in mind the weakness of the supportive
institutional framework for the proper functioning of the banking
sector in the 1990s, when irresponsibility and excessive risk-taking
as well as insider lending, cooking the books, and other fraudulent
activities caused the malfunctioning of the industry (on banking
misbehavior, see Männasoo [2003] and Zirnask [2002]). Thus, the
nonconformity of banking development in Estonia to the six-stage
approach can be partially explained by the peculiarities of the
transition economy. On the other hand, the introduction of the
lender of last resort function of the central bank (fourth stage)
did not take place in Estonia due to the currency board arrange-
ment as an institutional constraint in liquidity provision to the
banking system, whereas vigorous consolidation, accompanied by
a negligible local interbank lending activity (third stage) in the
mid-1990s, was the likely result of stricter prudential banking regu-
lation in terms of increased capital requirements as measures for
fighting recurring bank failures, but it also motivated the banks
to look for strategic investors and possible mergers as an alternative
to liquidation (Khoury and Wihlborg, 2006; Zirnask, 2002).
Accordingly, idiosyncratic elements and specific institutional
arrangements in terms of currency board arrangement, resolute
bankruptcy law, more stringent capital regulation, and a distinct
privatization approach operated as guiding and restraining factors
that led to high concentration, risk-averse credit policies of the
banks, and almost full foreign ownership in the banking system.
And given the renouncement of monetary sovereignty, the supply
of reserves was not guaranteed by the central bank, but by the par-
ent banks of Estonian affiliates. In other words, the establishment
of interest rates and credit volumes was left to the market, mostly
to foreign (Nordic) decision makers, which paved the way for
long-term foreign funding and this was revealed in the ratio of
the banking system’s assets to GDP, which doubled over eight years
in the 2000s. At the same time, the savings of the banking sector
increased rapidly in the aftermath of tax reform in the 2000s (see
below), which in turn contributed to the growth of credit. This did

not imply, however, that the supply-side constraints for getting
a bank loan became less severe for SMEs, insofar as consolidated
large banks have preferred larger projects, which have been rare
in Estonia’s small market (Teder, 1998). Moreover, as foreign-
owned companies in the manufacturing, real estate, retail and
wholesale, and other economic sectors have preferred to use
support services and also financial services within the established

home-based networks, the corporate credit portfolio of foreign-
owned banks has been biased toward Nordic customers (De Haas
and Naaborg, 2006; Festić, 2012). Yet, despite some manifestation
of positive feedback mechanisms between foreign-owned under-
takings in both the nonfinancial and financial sectors in Estonia,
with the discouraged use of bank credit for productive purposes
in general the growing assets of the banking sector have found
a counterpart in skyrocketing liabilities of households and the real
estate business.
Transformation of the housing market

An institutional factor of key importance, which brought together
bank financing and households was the privatization of land and
dwellings in the 1990s and its finalization in the early 2000s that
in principle gave the strongest boost to the explosive financing of
real estate and the construction sector. By 2001, 98.5 percent of
housing units were owned by private persons as a result of
privatization, although only ten years earlier, state and munici-
palities controlled up to 60 percent of housing (Varblane et al.,
2009). The privatization of land and dwellings in the 1990s did
not give rise to increased demand for mortgage loans because
it was accomplished with national capital bonds (Purju, 1996).
Hence, mortgage financing was virtually nonexistent in the 1990s
with the ratio of mortgage loans to GDP standing at only 5 percent
in 2000. The modest impact of banks was also related to difficulties
in applying for collateralized bank loans that were curbed by
high interest rates, while the low purchasing power of consumers
implied an inactive real estate market (OECD, 2000). Yet, one of
the main issues in the housing sector not addressed by the privati-
zation process was outdated housing stock. This was dealt with
after the privatization, once the real estate property could be used
as a collateral for housing loans with the purpose of renovation or
building new houses and apartments of higher quality (Varblane

et al., 2009). Thus, given the transfer of responsibility for housing
maintenance from the state to private individuals that occurred
along with the denationalization of commercial banks and the
resolution that Estonia would join the EU, institutional precondi-
tions were created for the take-off of the real estate boom.
An unprecedented housing and consumption boom gathered
further momentum from consumers’ confidence in rising incomes,

supportive fiscal measures, and low (negative real) interest rates
after accession to the EU in 2004. These developments laid the
foundation for increasing integration between finance and real
estate in the mid-2000s, as the relative backwardness of the real
estate market meant expanding investment opportunities (see Eesti
Pank [1998] on housing market problems in the 1990s).
Fiscal reforms
Both the foreign savings-led development path and the increasing
dominance of the financial and real estate sectors were reinforced
by tax reforms in the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of these was
the corporate income tax reform in 2000 that exempted reinvested
profits from income tax. As a result, the holdings of liquid assets
and retained earnings increased (see Figure 5), whereas the share
of debt in total assets decreased in the nonfinancial corporate
sector regardless of improved access to bank loans and favorable
interest rates (Masso et al., 2011; Sander, 2003). From the
structural perspective, the corporate tax reform exacerbated the
reallocation of capital from the current areas of activity (OECD,
2009). Likewise, Tiits et al. (2008) found that, by and large, the
macroeconomic policies implemented during the twenty-year
period reinforced the economic specialization that was established
during the 1990s. For banks and other financial intermediaries,
fiscal policies provided incentives to reinvest accumulated profits,
which tripled over a three-year span from 2005 to 2007 before
going into decline and eventual losses in 2009. As of 2009, the
accumulated retained earnings of the banking sector amounted
to 10.2 percent of GDP, compared to 0.006 percent of GDP in
2000 (see Figure 5). This accumulation was supported by the
decision of all the largest foreign-owned credit institutions in
Estonia to abstain from paying out dividends, which were taken
out for the first time in 2014.
Aside from income tax reform, various state guarantees and

fiscal transfers contributed to the increased profits of banks that
emanated from financing of the housing sector. In 1999, the largest
bank proposed that the government partly guarantee the down
payment of loans within the housing program for young families
that would enable banks to reduce the required down payment rate.
The support scheme, which was implemented by the state-owned
fund in 2000, also gave access to loans for borrowers who could
not afford a loan without state support. In essence, this policy
provided security to banks and enabled them to earn higher interest
income on the increased number of loans issued (Kallakmaa-
Kapsta, 2007). In addition, the Income Tax Act gave taxpayers
the possibility to deduct housing loan interests from taxable
income. All these reforms contributed to the generation of excess
financial capital in the banking sector that was absorbed mostly
by the household and the real estate sector. Therefore, neither
contributory nor incentivizing reasoning (see Piketty, 2014,
pp. 525–526) is tenable in the taxation of capital in Estonia’s case,
insofar as the loopholes in the legislation have enabled businesses to
disguise profits (economic income) and there has been no pressure
to invest the idle capital held in financial assets in more productive
usage. An emphasis on indirect and consumption taxes has favored
those who are able to save, which has increased both wealth
accumulation and its concentration, given the conditions for
the prevalence of qualifying holdings in the Estonian corporate
governance model, which were created in the early 1990s.
Thus, the accomplishment of privatization, the fiscal reforms
within the overall laissez-faire political agenda, and the restructur-
ing of the economy toward the service sector dominated by SMEs
were the sine qua non of the real estate and consumption boom
from 2004 to 2007, which was reinforced by the loosening credit
policies of foreign-owned banks.
The economy’s ailing productive capacity in light of increasing

foreign liabilities
Notwithstanding the prospects of pursuing sustainable long-term
FDI-led financing of development, if certain conditions are met
(Kregel, 2004), Estonia did not introduce the preconditions for this
development path. On the contrary, extreme liberalism in the
1990s brought several vulnerabilities through trade and FDI into
the Estonian economy, which eventually weakened the domestic

productive base.
The opening of the local market to foreign competitors revealed
deficiencies in the supply side, as the overflow of cheaper imported
goods of higher quality crowded out local producers (OECD,
2000). In such circumstances, market forces tilted the economy
toward expansion of the service sector, while the share of agricul-
ture and the manufacturing industry decreased. More importantly,

this approach to restructuring diminished both employment and
comparative advantages in the most capital-intensive and knowl-
edge-intensive branches of the economy such as mechanical engin-
eering and electronics (OECD, 2000). Therefore, the financial
sector was not behind deindustrialization, the free trade shocks
were (Reinert and Kattel, 2007). The loss of technological sophis-
tication in Estonian industries can be explained by the Vanek–
Reinert effect (see Reinert, 1980), whereby domestic companies
lost their market share due to the rapid liberalization of markets
and prices, which undermined demand for their products, and
on the other hand paved the way for specialization at the lower
end of the value chain with difficulties for technological upgrading
(Reinert and Kattel, 2007; Tiits et al., 2008).
With regard to FDI, companies in the Nordic countries have pri-
marily been interested in Estonia as a supplier of raw materials and
a suitable location for labor-intensive production with the advan-
tages of relatively low costs and its closeness to the Nordic and
other European markets. Quite often, acquired businesses were
turned into subcontractors, that is, producers of semifinished goods
in international production networks (Purju, 1996; Reiljan, 2006),
which induced growth in imports of components and intermediate
products. Therefore, despite the increased integration of local
industries into regional production networks of Nordic-based
multinational companies, the technological structure of industries
has not become more knowledge-intensive or complex; on the
contrary—the division of labor, specialization, and skilled labor
force have decreased with the decline in the capacity to exploit
new technologies. The results have been asymmetrical trade patterns
with Estonia’s specialization in resource-intensive and labor-
intensive activities, while the Scandinavian countries have retained
knowledge-intensive segments (Tiits et al., 2008). As a consequence,
low value-added and relatively low-paid labor-intensive production,
including subcontracting, dominated in Estonia’s exports for a long
period (Tiits et al., 2004). In these circumstances, the possibilities of

gaining from increasing returns in the manufacturing sector have
been hindered, which is revealed in the relatively important role
that the low-technology and medium- to low-technology industrial
sectors play in Estonia, as their share in the creation of the total
manufacturing value added stood at 53.2 percent and 20.5 percent,
respectively, in 2009 (UNIDO, 2012). In addition, vulnerability
stems from the volatile flows of subcontracting exports due

to dependence on the decisions of parent companies and less on
market forces, from which direct exports benefit (Ehrlich et al.,
2002, pp. 16–20). Therefore, by following this FDI-led growth
model, Estonia started out with a speculative position, which
gradually took on a Ponzi profile due to weaknesses on the assets
side of the economy’s balance sheet in terms of an inability to
upgrade the technological level of industries in order to increase
productivity and to produce goods with higher value added, which
would suffice to cover servicing of the increasing debt from net
capital inflows.
Vicious circles and the effects of the 2008 crisis

Evidently, these deeper structural problems of the Estonian econ-
omy were overshadowed by the seeming success story of economic
growth and development in the 2000s. In this regard, the boom
years of the 2000s, when banks channeled foreign capital into the
financing of consumption and investments in the nontradable
sectors and the eventual crisis were the inevitable consequences of
the transition process of the economy undertaken in the 1990s.
Everything considered, one could argue that the main outcomes
of the liberalization agenda—the primitivization of the local econ-
omy with deteriorating competitiveness due to free trade shocks,
sustained structural dependence on unmanaged capital inflows,
and credit-based consumption—implied hazardous lock-in effects
and chronic current account deficits. To some extent, the lock-ins
of the economy entailed a whirlpool of mutually reinforcing
impulses. Specifically, the exceptional economic growth that was
underpinned by the housing boom led to unrealistic expectations
of ongoing growth and attracted additional foreign capital in
the context of decreasing risk premiums and interest rates. At the
same time, positive expectations on the market evoked rampant
leveraging by banks, which was manifest in the deterioration of
the loan-to-deposits ratio from 69.1 percent in 1993 to 168 percent

in 2007 (author’s calculation based on Eesti Pank, 2015). These
dynamics indicate a positive feedback mechanism between business
cycles and capital flows, which increase the danger of financial
bubbles during the growth phase (Danilov, 2003). Estonia’s idio-
syncrasy, however, is nearly full foreign ownership of the banking
industry, which has exacerbated “normal” business cycles through
the liquidity and funding channel. Buoyant economic growth came

to an end in 2007, when a slowdown in credit growth resulted
from the decision of foreign parent banks to reduce lending to their
Estonian affiliates in the wake of the global turmoil in 2008
(Kaarna et al., 2012, p. 49). And, given the local economy’s reliance
on external funding, which underpinned double-digit growth rates,
the drying-up of both the international interbank and debt markets
put the brakes on capital inflows to Estonia. Consequently, reduced
access to credit and tightened credit standards, coupled with the
increased cost of funding and overall uncertainty about economic
prospects, resulted in weakened consumption, borrowing, and
investment activity after 2008 (Bernhardtson and Billborn, 2010;
Festić, 2012; Kattel, 2010).
Essentially, the strategy built around the foreign-savings-led
growth made the economy particularly vulnerable to capital flow
volatility and increased the risk of a currency crisis until 2011,
when Estonia joined the euro area. At the same time, the economy
has been exposed to growing debt service payments on outstanding
foreign liabilities or even worse, to large-scale capital flight
through deleveraging and divestments, given a high share of
foreign liabilities on the balance sheets of foreign-owned banks
and other businesses.
Discussion and conclusions

As the study shows, the Estonian development strategy relied on
foreign capital without realizing that the roll-over of FDI and
foreign loans, if used to finance the domestic market targeting
investments and consumption instead of export industries, gives
rise to Minsky’s Ponzi financing position in terms of covering
the current account deficit with the accumulation of foreign liabil-
ities. In this regard, uncontrolled growth of financial liabilities
from cross-border investment activities, which could be considered
a form of financialization (Piketty, 2014, pp. 193–194), poses
significant vulnerabilities for small states such as Estonia, if the

rise in net wealth falls behind. One of the prospects faced by the
local economy is a much lower net national income compared to
gross domestic product due to the outflow of profits and rents,
which brings to the fore the issue of inequality of capital ownership
in an international dimension and may give rise to political ten-
sions (see Piketty [2014] on international inequality). In the long
term, the growth of savings accruing to foreigners in the form of

capital factor service constrains domestic demand and tilts the
economy toward a debt-deflationary regime (see Hudson [2006]
on savings, asset-price inflation, and the debt deflation model).
In Estonia’s case, the issue of inequality has been exacerbated by
its special institutional characteristics. In particular, tax reforms
have favored the accumulation and concentration of savings,
which in turn have been converted into more debt, given an insig-
nificant taxation of capital and income incurred on capital (e.g.,
the corporate income tax rate is zero and there is no real estate
tax whatsoever).
In the setup of an institutional framework for the operation of
a market economy, risks associated with the adoption of the
Washington Consensus (WC) policies were not acknowledged in
Estonia (for a general critique of WC macroeconomic policies,
see Herr and Priewe, 2006, pp. 174–179). Among others, these
included the rigidity of a currency board arrangement, the destabi-
lizing effect of no controls on capital inflows and outflows, and the
liberalization of international flows of goods and finance, which led
to growing external debt. As a result, the “euroization” of the
economy took place through bank credit channels, which entailed
a currency mismatch, and this, in turn, compromised the use of
an exchange rate as an adjustment mechanism. This self-imposed
monetary conservatism, accompanied by a low commitment to
countercyclical macroeconomic policies for the constraint of insta-
bility, indicates a disregard for principles of functional finance and
a lack of understanding of the impact of fiscal and monetary
policies on the processes of cumulative causation in the whole
economy. By and large, two lines of reasoning can be offered to
explain this observation. First, the neoliberal approach taken in
market reforms and tax policies sent clear signals to international
capital markets by favoring capital and finance as opposed to
labor, and was an incentive for continued financing of internal
and external imbalances of the economy. And this, in turn,
facilitated the continued pursuit of the established political agenda

on economic issues. Here, a kind of symbiosis between the
institutional arrangements and the foreign-savings-led economic
catching-up process reveals the workings of a vicious circle.
At the same time, the historical institutionalist tradition provides
sound grounds for understanding the “stickiness” of formal rules
and institutions in the long run, that is, path dependence. In Estonia’s
case, institutional inertia in terms of continuous blind belief in the

legitimacy of the established macroeconomic policies accounts
for discernible rapid recovery after previous crisis episodes in the
1990s, when the perception of austerity and liberalization of the
financial sphere “working” themselves out with positive outcomes
got embedded in the political mindset (Kattel and Raudla, 2013).
Thus, in view of passiveness in macroeconomic policies, struc-
tural changes in Estonia have been left to the workings of market
forces, particularly after the completion of the mass privatization
of state-owned assets, which was a key factor behind the ensuing
housing market boom in the 2000s and the takeover of the “cream
of the crop” of Estonian industry by foreign investors. Unfortu-
nately, as in Latin America, the dual nature of foreign direct invest-
ments and the diffusion of technologies in the catching-up process
(Gerschenkron, 1962) did not occur. As described above, mainly
unsophisticated and lower value-added economic activities were
attracted, which indicates a so-called Mexican syndrome, that is,
assembly-line production with the exploitation of cheap labor.
The outcome of this kind of economic specialization has been a mis-
match between the content of exports and imports, which implies in
turn a propensity toward deteriorating terms of trade in the long
run and weakening of the country’s ability to service external debt
(on the decline in terms of trade in Latin America, see Prebisch,
1950; see also Singer, 1950). In addition, the enclave nature of
FDI in the Estonian economy and the relatively high share of
FDI in oligopolistic sectors such as banking, real estate, and retail
industries have implied that multiplier effects from profits and pro-
ductivity growth have increasingly been taken out abroad. In this
regard, both asymmetric international intra-industry specialization
and foreign investments in the sectors that target a host market
have worsened the economy’s international financial position and
hence predisposed the economy to a Ponzi financing profile.
On the whole, Estonia has followed in the footsteps of Latin
American countries, especially in relation to restrictive macroeconomic
policies aimed at guaranteeing the stability of the exchange

rate and also low inflation for attracting foreign capital (on the
Latin American experience, see Huerta, 2006; Vernengo, 2006).
The pursuit of this political course has, however, brought adverse
consequences to the economy. In the course of two decades,
Estonia has been turned into a typical semi-periphery country
with a less sophisticated technological level than its Scandinavian
partners and very limited control over the financial system.

Moreover, the economy has been strongly affected by the global
business cycles, let alone those at the regional level, and by the
decisions made by the parent companies of Estonian affiliates.
This was particularly evident in the actions of foreign-owned
banks in the pre- and post-2007 period, which revealed the
procyclical lending behavior of the banks. Excessive lending during
the boom years in the mid-2000s contributed to real exchange
rate appreciation and widened current account deficits, which
worsened the financial position of domestic producers against foreign
competitors. In light of these negative outcomes of Estonia’s
approach in an overall transition toward a market-based economy,
reasoning about the path to sustainable development, which is
predicated on a bank-based financial system in transition eco-
nomies (on the case of eight Eastern European countries of the
EU, see Springler, 2006) is somewhat ambiguous, particularly
when the context-specific institutional factors and peculiarities
are not taken into consideration. In Estonia’s case, by and large,
the challenge is to depart from the path dependency set in the
1990s on both the political level and in the structure of the econ-
omy, where the financialization process revealed itself in heavy
reliance on foreign capital in both the financial and nonfinancial
sectors, which underpinned rapid but unsustainable economic
growth.
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Journal of Post Keynesian Economics

ISSN: 0160-3477 (Print) 1557-7821 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mpke20

“Latin Americanization” of the Estonian economy:

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01603477.2015.1070270

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“Latin Americanization” of the Estonian

Abstract: By drawing on the tradition of institutionalism and the Minsky–

Key words: financial fragility, financialization, foreign direct investments,

Estonia has been portrayed as a poster child not only in terms of

flat tax system, has been accompanied by a rapid annual real

for understanding the ensuing economic processes. Hence, on

Minsky–Kregel framework and financalization

structural patterns are related to the financial sustainability of the

foreign liabilities, both the notion of an enclave economy (Galla-

the notion of financialization). Aside from a typical increase in the

markets and innovations that have contributed to increasing

Growth induced in Estonia by foreign savings

taken place in the allocation of inward FDI. In the early 1990s,

Figure 1 Direct investment positions in Estonia by fields of activity,

Source: Author’s calculations based on data from Eesti Pank, 2015.

Figure 2 Capital inflows, net external debt, and international investment

Source: Author’s calculations based on data from Eesti Pank, 2015.

negative in 2012 (author’s calculation based on Eesti Pank, 2015),

Figure 3 The composition of banks’ loan portfolio at year-end,

Source: Author’s calculations based on data from Eesti Pank, 2015.

in 1996 to 104 percent in 2009 (author’s calculations based on Eesti

Figure 4 Current account balance in Estonia, 1993–2014 (% of GDP)

Source: Author’s calculations based on data from Eesti Pank, 2015.

disequilibrating trends in the Estonian economy made the situation

Neoliberalism, privatization, and openness to foreign capital

implementing macroeconomic reforms and also a liberalization

the purpose of price and macroeconomic stability (Khoury and

process. The effect of the privatization of state-owned businesses,

with large corporations. Because the privatization policy targeted

Figure 5 Economic indicators of the nonfinancial corporate sector and

preferred growth-stage investments rather than risky start-up

the four largest foreign-owned banks gained control over 95 percent

below), which in turn contributed to the growth of credit. This did

support services and also financial services within the established

Transformation of the housing market

building new houses and apartments of higher quality (Varblane

further momentum from consumers’ confidence in rising incomes,

Aside from income tax reform, various state guarantees and

The economy’s ailing productive capacity in light of increasing

the Estonian economy, which eventually weakened the domestic

ture and the manufacturing industry decreased. More importantly,

period (Tiits et al., 2004). In these circumstances, the possibilities of

stems from the volatile flows of subcontracting exports due

Vicious circles and the effects of the 2008 crisis

the loan-to-deposits ratio from 69.1 percent in 1993 to 168 percent

the liquidity and funding channel. Buoyant economic growth came

Discussion and conclusions

significant vulnerabilities for small states such as Estonia, if the

term, the growth of savings accruing to foreigners in the form of

facilitated the continued pursuit of the established political agenda