Is emigration the achilles heel of austerity? Much higher recalculated numbers from Latvia

On this blog, quite some attention has been devoted to the European crisis, austerity and emigration from the austerity poster children, the Baltic countries, especially from Lithuania as emigration statistics for Latvia and Estonia were not too dependable. Latvia has recently recalculated emigration since 2000 up to an including 2011 (the graphs show data up to 2010 but the text also mentions 2011). Net emigration in the crisis period (2008-2011) was six to seven times as high as the old data indicated. Close to 115.000 people (net!) left this country with barely 2 million inhabitants in these four years. Which is almost 6% of the total population and which, as the young and healthy are generally overrepresented, might well mean that the labour force decreased with about 8 %. Without this massive net emigration, already sky high 2009 and 2010 unemployment would have been even higher and the declines of last years would have been much smaller, if not completely absent.  I’m totally in favour of free movement of people in the EU and these movements do give people the possibility to escape the consequences of austerity. But the data also indicate that front loading austerity, like the Baltic countries have done, is not a solution. And we should not be surprised if about 10% of the population of the southern European states will eventually leave these countries in the 2010-2020 period.