Estonia's success: prescription or legacy?

This paper focuses on Estonias post-communist transition and attempts to de termine why it has been more successful than the other two Baltic states. L ithuania and Latvia. It proposes that the central factor conditioning the o utcome of the Baltic states' transition process was their different experie nces during the Soviet period. Although the post-independence reform progra m itself played a crucial role in Estonia's successful transition, the pape r concludes that the seeds for the countrys achievements can actually be fo und in its Soviet legacy: Estonia's selection of policies, their implementa tion and the resulting positive outcome were all dependent on favorable con ditions which had been established in Estonia during the Soviet period. Sig nificantly, these positive conditions had not been created in the other two Baltic states. (C) 2001 The Regents of the University of California. Publi shed by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.