I had a pretty intense honeymoon with Estonia, even had a relatively popular blog on e-residency, have visited Estonia twice (great experience btw)..<p>And, after four years, I have reopened my company in UK and trying to liquidate my Estonian one (today I have received a denial letter which says that only Estonian citizen can close my company)..<p>In short: Vague frequently changing rules, introduction of strange complex regulations over time (e.g. contact person, management board member tax which is kinda avoidable or not at the same time - "Schrodinger tax").. Expensive business services and accountants (yes, US and UK are cheaper!), volatile tax rules interpretations.. Lack of googlable good information overall, and local accountants are not that hi level pros in nomadic IT matters at all. Also totally non-cooperative Estonian banks.<p>Upon all of that, UK manages doing everything without fragile e-card, which, honestly, adds more anxiety over access loss instead of benefits. Has TONS AND TONS of proper official information with tutorials. Generations of good accountants and stable business and tax regulations.
I've run and invested in businesses in multiple countries (Spain, Germany, US, UAE, Sri Lanka). One of them (Mobile Jazz - a fully remote company) we've moved to Estonia in 2016. One of the best business decisions we've made admin-wise. While there are for sure better alternatives when it comes to "saving on taxes" (I'd say Estonia is in the European average with 20% corporate tax and an interesting taxation model on capital distribution), it is definitely a huge improvement when it comes to dealing with authorities compared to virtually elsewhere in the world, based on what I've experienced myself of heard from others. Estonian people speak really good English. Typically things just work as they should and it something doesn't, they're super fast in responding and very eager to solve the problem for you. While I don't have visibility on everything that happens in the country, in terms of how they handle their bureaucracy, they're certainly a role model for other countries.
As a Norwegian I can relate to many things written here. Estonia is clearly ahead of us but this thing of not being the innovator but still using off the shelf technology was something I was forced to reflect upon while living in the US 15 years ago.<p>It was surprising how the country behind so much technology innovation was so bad at using it. It was noticeable both in the private and public sector.<p>It was something that I was later reminded of when reading guns, germs and steel. The author Jared Diamond remarked that the technological progress of any society is not primarily decided by your ability to innovate but by your ability to adopt and use the inventions of others. As he remarks, most innovation happens outside your own country, so it is the ability to learn from others which matters most.<p>A thing I think people should be aware of when obsessing about having the most cutting edge researchers rather than a technology literate population.
I had a chance to work for the Estonian government for a brief while (headed up business development for e-Residency). While a few things may be overblown about their e-gov initiatives (I'm thinking some of the blockchain hype that foreign journalists didn't really fact check) they really have done an incredible job making their business environment accessible for foreigners. There really is a strong mentality of delivering government services with the end user as the customer mentality rather than the usual bureaucratic nonsense I was used to running businesses in the U.S. and Germany.
No opinion on Estonia and its e-government, but running a country like a tech company sounds like a plot of a comedy set in a dystopia. I certainly hope that Estonia is ran better than most tech company<p>Tech companies have many problems that I don't want see in a Government:<p>- Security breaches (and just like every other tech company Bulgaria recently had a dump of the personal data of 5 million citizens)<p>- Privacy issues, like contractors listening in on sounds recorded by their devices<p>- tons of intrusive ads<p>- discrinatory pricing<p>- products people rely on being killed off for no reason<p>- hype-, and resume-driven development<p>- general lack of accountability, masked with trendy but misunderstood methodologies like Agile, Scrum<p>- move fast and break things works for Facebook, but not for health insurance software<p>Tech companies fail all the time, but the pieces are picked up by investors, yet governments cannot afford to fail in the same way.
If you're thinking about starting a company in Estonia under the "e-residency" program, you should know that Estonian banks have recently become very skeptical about opening bank accounts for foreigners. It's not enough that you have an Estonian corporation, you'll probably be expected to demonstrate that your business has actual ties to Estonia.<p>Finnish entrepreneurs are being denied bank accounts despite the close ties of the two countries:
<a href="https://www.hs.fi/talous/art-2000006279056.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.hs.fi/talous/art-2000006279056.html</a>
(Article in Finnish only, sorry)<p>The background for this change is a huge money laundering scandal where Estonian banks took in Russian money over decades with very few questions asked... It sucks that "little guy" startup founders are the ones getting excluded, but that's how it goes.
I've heard so much about Estonia's digital economy, but I struggle to see the effect it has on it's own economy. Now, my data might be bad, but a cursory look at Estonia's GDP growth rate shows perfectly normal growth alongside Lithuania and Latvia [0]. Using Latvia and Lithuania to control for a digital economy, Estonia should see greater growth, but it doesn't. If going head-first into a digital economy had a significant pay-off, it should show up in the data. Until it does, I'm still sceptical.<p>0: <a href="https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_kd_zg&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:EST:LVA:LTU&ifdim=region&hl=en&dl=en&ind=false" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...</a>
I found this podcast about estonia's digital economy very informative<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTyOboVluxA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTyOboVluxA</a><p>It's interesting how the East of europe seems to have similar aspirations. Growing, poor or former poor countries (Estonia, latvia, Romania, bulgaria, cyprus, malta) are bullish on using the EU status to attract foreign investors and enable entrepreneurship, including lowering their taxes, while the west of EU seems to be doing the exact opposite, sending their entrepreneurs abroad.
We have recently registered a company in Estonia. The process was very smooth and easy. All hail Estonia, the small county that could!<p>(Opening a business bank account is a lot of pain, so there is still room for improvement)
Rememeber: We're talking about a country that had to be bootstrapped after the fall of Soviet Union. They have had very little legacy (as in "old but not old enough to warrant a replacement") tech and legislation to deal with.<p>My personal favorite is their wireless PSTN: Take existing NMT technology and give people tabletop terminals that will accommodate ordinary analog phones.
I find more intriguing/interesting than the whole actual Estonian e-id/whatever technological achievements, that the President of a country writes an article (of course not very critical on the way the governement administration is managed) on qz.com.
Taking the govt. services online is generally a good idea, but there are a lot of minefields along the way and is inherently tied to the country in question.<p>I can only speak from the context of India where many things have indeed moved online, but are not exactly accessible. For one thing, they are essentially restricted to a small class of English speakers - which is expected since the English-speaking elite have a monopoly on education and thus technological literacy. This has meant that all the small shops which are now forced to file GST invoices (3 times a month ?) need to hire touts of some kind to get their work done. There are touts for everything, since very few people have computers or the necessary skills to use them - touts for filling in passport applications, for filling in DL forms etc.... and frankly it's all very frustrating, since you'll have to take a printout of the online application and visit some Indian Babu anyway.<p>Since "Indians" have been decided by the rulers to be essentially corrupt, it has also meant that there is no escape from the inflexibility of the straightjacket that is the Indian bureaucracy. Classic case of extremely poor people employed as manual labour being denied food rations because their fingerprints don't match that on record, or simply because the cellular data is patchy has quickly been covered by the UIDAI and their cronies in the government.<p>The language issue also shows up often because, after 70 years of so-called independence, the country has yet to create a unified transliteration scheme to go along with its "destroy all Indian languages" policy... and different transliterations of brahmi (for instance "sri" and "sree" are both the same श्री) often require absurd name-change announcements and numerous "letters" to random officers (and the usual palm greasing) in order to get access to services.<p>For much of India's "independence" a extractive state run for a handful of elites generally kept away from governance while its elites enjoyed vacations abroad and went to hospitals in Vienna (other than passing insane, unenforceable laws). I'm generally afraid what the deeply rooted colonial mindset will give rise to, now that it has also has access to technology. UIDAI and its sister schemes was and remains a rather scary venture with what appears to be a view of replicating China's draconian policies.
Anybody got experience in UK vs Estonia? I have lived and run companies in the UK and USA. The UK is light years ahead of the US in terms of all online interactions with the government. It's also been a long time since I have done any paper-based interaction with the government in the UK, the online systems have been really good for years.<p>Curious how it compares to Estonia.
"For some weird and unexplainable reason, people normally expect better services from private companies than from their own governments."<p>Right or wrong, it's not that unexplainable. People leave their cell phone carrier over bad customer service. They buy their things from a different website because of poor service, or go to a different store. It's cheap to change your allegiance to a different brand. It's a lot more expensive to change your allegiance to a different government. Governments in most places in the world have little incentive to improve.<p>Governments and private companies are both institutions, they just face different incentive structures. Governments aren't somehow magically protected from the people that run them having incentives.
Creating a bank account as a foreigner has become increasingly difficult since a subsidiary of Danske [1], a prior Fortune Global 500, was caught in a major money laundering case which has brought the scrutiny of EU and US regulators into their banking sector.<p>For those interested in opening an e-business in Estonia, please be mindful that due to the 'Tech Company' way in which the government looks to operate, that there is an increasing rate of change in regulations which can impact your business decisions, although major generic areas such as Corporate and Personal tax rate has trended downwards (around 25% in 2004 and 20% now).<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank#Danske_Bank_(Finland)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank#Danske_Bank_(Finla...</a>
Choosing markets brings prosperity. Like the "German Miracle" after WW2 (not the Marshall Plan), when you abandon bureaucratic regulations and allow the market to take over, vast and quick advancement comes, and everyone does much better. <a href="https://fee.org/articles/how-estonia-yes-estonia-became-one-of-the-wealthiest-countries-in-eastern-europe/" rel="nofollow">https://fee.org/articles/how-estonia-yes-estonia-became-one-...</a>
Interesting! to see how to run money laundry like a tech company.
<a href="https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/10/17/a-massive-money-laundering-scandal-stains-the-image-of-nordic-banks" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/10/17/a...</a>
My understanding is that Estonia's tech push has some "great PR" but very little substance, and some of my friends' experiences, as well as some other HN commenters on this thread, seem to agree.
A lot is said about Estonia but Lithuania is better positioned and grows faster than Estonia.<p>It's interesting but to me Estonia cant quite compete with its neighbors to the point of becoming wealthier than they are now.
I'd imagine in most developed countries you can do everything online. In New Zealand over the last year I've renewed my passport, setup a company, renewed my drivers license, re-registered my car, opened a business bank account, renewed my mortgage, handled my taxes, etc. All online. The only thing that you can do online in Estonia which I can't do here that I can think of is vote.<p>Of course NZ is usually ranked as either 1 or 2 on the "ease of doing business" rankings and has low levels of bureaucracy so that might not be typical but I'm also a UK citizen and I renewed my passport from NZ online with no fuss.
So with the expectation that it will either succeed wildly and they'll sell it to google or it will flame the fuck out and take years off of its employee's lives?
I have some questions, if I want to make a free-speech protected project, is Estonia a country that will protect my business over silly demands or anything close like that?
Income inequality is very large there.
<a href="https://borgenproject.org/top-10-facts-about-living-conditions-in-estonia/" rel="nofollow">https://borgenproject.org/top-10-facts-about-living-conditio...</a>
Before people start praising Estonia for its e-voting system, which inevitably happens on such stories, let me remind you that the system was indeed open to compromise:<p><a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/estonias-id-card-scrisis-how-e-states-poster-child-got-into-and-out-of-trouble/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zdnet.com/article/estonias-id-card-scrisis-how-e...</a><p>The timeline may also match the hack the GCHQ and NSA did against the Estonian e-ID provider, Gemalto:<p><a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/" rel="nofollow">https://theintercept.com/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/</a><p>So remember that even with hardware tokens used in electronic voting, which are supposed to be much more secure than using other forms of authentication, you still run the risk of having the election compromised, especially since an election is something important enough that more than one major country could be interested in manipulating at any given time.<p>It's not like the "well, I'm nobody, so why would the NSA/other spy agency target me?!" situation at all. We're talking about the decision of who gets to run a whole country, and sophisticated adversaries will be very interested in influencing that if it can serve their interests.<p>We know China hacks tons of countries, we know Russia has been meddling with all sorts of elections lately, and we also know that for the past 70 years the USA has interfered in about one election per year, on average. This is not just theoretical stuff that would never happen. And I'm sure there are many Middle-Eastern and other Asian countries interested in influencing their rivals' elections, too.<p><a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/americas-long-history-of-meddling-in-other-countries-elections" rel="nofollow">https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/americas-long-histor...</a>
The title says nothing, we need KPIs, average life span, mortality rates, unemployment rates, health indices, education indices, overall quality of life indices. Fancy titles are meaningless.