This week's Latvian economy statistics

Latvian exports in July increased by 23.7% compared to last year, to 328.3 mln lats (470 mln euros), while imports increased by 39.3%, to 717.5 mln lats (1.02 bln euros). So, the Latvian trade deficit sets another record and Latvia is now importing 2.2 times more than it's exporting. My common sense says that this trend can't last for long. But it's lasting longer than I expected. (I was already saying "it can't last like this" 3 years ago when Latvia was importing 1.7 times more than exporting.)

Latvian analysts say that it's even worse, since most of increase in exports has been because of the price increases (15% on average), rather than Latvia actually increasing exports. Well, at least other countries are still buying Latvian products at higher prices.

Meanwhile, the inflation in Latvia is now at 10.1%. Our prime minister is calling people to save more money and spend and borrow less... The rest of the country is busy finding examples how the government itself is not living up to that, to show that the prime minister is a hypocrite. And there is a lot of examples. The current government is quite a PR disaster. (In terms of actual policies, there is not much they can do to decrease the inflation, for reasons described in this post.)