Estonia: Become an E-Resident
e-resident.gov.ee
e-resident.gov.ee
And there is a good reason why you would like to do that[1]:
> For the ninth year in a row, Estonia has the best tax code in the OECD.
For instance, if you live in Estonia, you can use an Estonian limited liability company to manage all your investments without paying any taxes at all, as long as you don't withdraw any money from it.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/international-tax-com...
"Estonia clocks fastest inflation in the Eurozone at 20.1 percent" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665931
https://www.prismamarket.ee/products | https://www.rimi.ee/epood/en | https://www.barbora.ee/ | https://www.selver.ee/ (no English)
You are too polite.
Its quality of life index is way higher then the USA as well, though that doesn't really say anything about its democracy.
It would be interesting to see any reputable sources claiming that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are "far from true democracies".
It should only be possible, if that person was born in Soviet Union (that is, before 1990), and doesn't speak the official language of the country he / she is living in.
Because they've chosen not to pursue citizenship. There's a simplified path that anyone in this situation can utilize. I don't see how giving them the choice and allowing them to live and work in the country indefinitely even if they choose no is in any way "un-democratic".
And if you're suggesting that 30 years is not enough time to learn the absolute basics of a language, that is just utterly ridiculous. Not nearly as ridiculous as comparing this to the slave labor that built Dubai though.
I think as an outsider you are completely missing the point: if Estonians ever wanted to give the Estonian citizenship to the residents who are unwilling to learn the official language of the country, they would have already done that.
Because by giving somebody a citizenship, you give them the right to vote. And who would the Russian speakers vote for, if they don't speak any Estonian? Pro-Russian parties and politicians.
These people were never born in Estonia, they were born in the USSR.
These people never spoke Estonian, and never tried to speak.
Nobody ever asked them to stay in Estonia and to pay taxes in Estonia.
They are always welcome to leave, if they don't want to fully integrate into the Estonian society by learning the official language of the country.
Fundamentally, the ethnic Estonians don't owe anything to the descendants of their occupiers.
Technically, Estonia is not the successor state of the USSR, Russia is. If a person was born in the USSR, and only speaks the official language of the successor state of the USSR, then that person should probably be a Russian citizen, not Estonian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech%E2%80%93Slovak_languages
Not true for Lithuania. Educate yourself.
The people in question are ethnic Russians who CHOOSE to not get a citizenship. They choose this, beccause people in Baltics without citizenship have the right to travel both within the EU and in Russia without a visa. Just to make it extra clear, let me draw you a table of a citizenship matrix in Estonia:
Estonian citizen - can travel within EU, needs visa for Russia
Russian citizen - needs visa for EU, can travel within Russia
No citizenship - can travel within EU, can travel within Russia
In the 1990s Estonian citizenship was given to any resident who asked for it, zero requirements. The people who remain stateless today rejected the proposal. Nowadays its more difficult to get Estonian citizenship, but still within reach for plenty of these people. They just don't want to do it, again, because they have friends and family in Russia - and Estonian citizens can't freely travel to Russia.
They can still vote for local elections and work. So there isn't really a strong incentive to care.
The best incentive for getting an actual citizenship is for those who want to travel beyond EU & Russia, because the global world doesn't give these stateless people special rights.
Athens didn't have universal suffrage, and they invented democracy (and were in many ways far more democratic than anything we have today). They had some pretty radical measures for mixing up who actually got to hold office, such as sortition, and misbehaving officials risked ostracicsm by public vote.
I think this is something that is severely overlooked in contemporary democracy. It's a very small clique indeed that stands any realistic chance of holding office in most western democracies. Ultimately doesn't really matter who gets to vote if the candidates are all the same.
Limited rights in the sense of not being able to vote for the parliament, sure. However that isn't unusual at all. In fact, I don't know of any counter example. Do you have an example of a country where non-citizens can vote for the highest form of government?
As for local elections, in Estonia both Russian citizens and ethnic Russians without any citizenship are allowed to vote. That is extremely democractic.
This isn’t a super thought-through response. Would be curious to see if people have ideas to add.
Instead of avoiding taxes and coming up with silly hacks - one should pay his fair share in his own country and try to build community and wealth around himself and his close ones.
Energy/wealth spent to avoid taxes in way where you move from country to country or do some weird stuff could be spent probably on building a small business or two.
I agree there are bad places to live and people have to run away from these or move because they don't earn enough in their place so they move out for more opportunity, but if it goes down to "I just want to keep more money for myself" is just not right and not moral at all.
what ?
> Current income, inflation and taxation levels in the EU can be considered immoral as well
There is no free lunch, that's how we get infrastructure, healthcare, social benefits, &c.
If you think Estonia is as fucked up as the UAE we can stop discussing now, you're either completely delusional or acting in bad faith, feel free to go live there, if all you care about is money I'm sure it feels like Heaven
If you absolutely love money and have no moral at least say it, even Soros did it: "I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do."
The predominantly ethnic Russian who were living in the SSR of Latvia or Estonia, but were not Latvian citizens before 1940, and who have not learned the language and acquired citizenship after '91 have rights, but cannot vote or hold some political offices. Same with any other foreigner. They can learn the national language and apply for citizenship. Choosing not to doesn't mean they are treated poorly or unfairly.
https://rosalux-geneva.org/baltics-breaking-up-after-a-force...
Also the posts I mentioned are almost universally “I assume or have assumed that I can just buy a house and work remotely from Japan”, but there a few that are looking for loopholes to be a digital nomad.
> Not having been a resident during the 10 years immediately preceding the date of application.
Which is different from what you said.
IIRC, most countries with income tax tax by where income is earned (that is, where the work is done) by default, not residency, though many have tax treaties with each other that assign income earned by residents of a foreign country in the other treaty partner back to the country of residence.
How much is the tax, when I withdraw the money?
“ Estonia has pursued the development of the e-government, with 99 percent of the public services being available on the web 24 hours a day.[198] In 2005 Estonia became the first country in the world to introduce nationwide binding Internet voting in local elections of 2005.[199] In 2019 parliamentary elections 44% of the total votes were cast over the internet.”
The internet itself was begat by government and public money, so this wouldn’t surprise me.
People can be confident in paper votes because they can understand how to audit the result, and who does it. The best e-voting software in the world can provide that level of trust only to some engineers who know the code, and only if they can audit all the systems where the software is deployed.
It's like passwords, it can't work if part of the population has no clue why it's needed or how it works. It's even worse with blockchain, because you can't put everything on the blockchain, it needs to interact with the real world, and that's where you can cheat the system (like stealing the keys of people in retirement homes because they don't know what they are for - sure it happens with paper but it's harder to do and easier to catch them in the act).
Wikipedia has a whole article about it in the Estonian case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia
Stuffing ballot boxes is much easier than an attack on an electronic voting system.
If you have free and independent observers it most definitely is not. If you don't have them it doesn't matter (with an electronic system you would have had exactly the same results both in Ukraine and Korea just at a much lower cost..). You'd need much resources and political power to compromise a normal election. With internet voting you'd need just a few people in the right spot (i.e. developing/maintaining the system) and some security vulnerability/backdoor to do it.
Also it's virtually impossible to guarantee both security and anonymity with internet voting.
That's both a strength and weakness of the system. The less people in the process, the easier it is for someone to manipulate the process.
That's irrespective of limiting the choices, obviously.
With internet voting we lose that. There is no way for most people to audit the system. Even if it's supposedly open source and transparent it's tricky to guarantee that the actual system is not tampered with and has no backdoors.
> Election integrity is more about the people running the election
True. But but fraud involving paper ballots is both difficult to execute at a large scale and hard to hide from other which is a huge deterrence.
Yes the electronic system can have flaws, but the old system didn't prevent the issues either. So might as well go with convenience.
I very much love what estonia is doing, they have 1 obvious problem. They have a crazy neighbour.
- The E-id has a lot of tech debt.
- Estonia is very far from being a "high tech country". Bus stops don't tell you the expected wait time, very few businesses are online, it's often complex to interact with the ones that are if you don't use a local bank, as apparently it's too hard to use Stripe. My internet provider doesn't support recurring payments and I can't pay with a credit card.
- Estonian data collection is creepy. For instance, they collected around 10% of the country's inhabitants' dna to make "medecine of the future". In a country where you have to wait > 1 month to get an appointment for a general doctor and where you pay 20% VAT on pharmaceuticals, right.
- Corruption is widespread in some layers of the society. Bribing public servant for school/kindergarten is common (I know many people who did it...). Tallinn's chronic mismanagement is probably due to the fact that town hall officials go work to the companies that deal with the city - Bolt being one of the first that comes to mind. Also, the massive money laundering scheme that got Danske Bank caught was known by every bank in the country, and all took part to it. The country being so small, it's very very easy to corrupt the right people, and it's quite cheap.
- Can we talk about the fact that several government and city officials drive Bolt cabs to make ends meet?
- Estonian tax system is crazy regressive. 20% vat on food! 20% flat income tax! Wtf is wrong with you guys?
Instead of doing ads like this article, the government should maybe work on reducing the sky high preventable disease rates, mental issues in the population, find actual solution for the estonian language problem (as not telling people, "lol just learn Estonian by yourself dude"), stop reducing the spending in education, fund Estonian culture, which is now either a thing for tourists or an source of extractable public funding for the affluent Estonians.
By the way, take care of your monuments - I've seen so many old manors (Mois) falling in ruins, it's a real shame. Maybe that's a better long term investment that another german SUV bought on leasing.
And because its a normal x502 certificate you can use Mutual TLS to authenticate every ID-Card holder / Estonian citizen by just adding those 3 lines to your nginx server config block[2]
ssl_client_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/EID_Bundle.pem;
ssl_verify_client on;
ssl_verify_depth 2
Due to the ease of integration, the same ID-Card is also used to implement login for a lot of online websites and is also used as an Loyalty card in stores. It is also possible to use the ID-Card for SSH login[3] because it's just a standard smart card.
* There is also an Mobile-ID that stores the x502 cert on you phone SIM card and a Smart-ID iPhone/Android app that require custom API-s and paying for the access.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
[2]: https://www.id.ee/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/2104-ubuntu-ngi...
[3]: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/security-smart-cards-ssh
The Estonian e-id is a good idea, but very badly implemented, and quite creepy: - You need to install some government software on your computer to use basic services. They ask you to install a browser extension. huh...
- The software UI is really crap. You get error messages in Russian, you have 3 apps for different purposes. You need to dump your cookies before using the e-id online, and it's nowhere said. Using e-id is usually a real pain, as it doesn't work out of the box most of the time.
- It's not needed most of the time. Why do I need to find my e-id, the adapter, my code, just to check my internet provider account? A simple mail/password would have been fine.
- If you're on your phone, you can use a "mobil-id" and use it like this, and pay using your id. Ok, but then, well...there's a disturbing centralization of data. A friend got a tax inspection because his supermarket card was linked to his e-id and he was seemingly spending more than what he was getting paid for his job. Are you OK with the government spying on your spending?
- Estonia has almost no public services. Healthcare is a joke here - you need to wait often more than 3 months to see a specialist, even in Tallinn. Kindergartens are very difficult to access without bribing the administration (you don't need an e-id for this). There's a very opaque "elite school" system, which is geared around gatekeeping the good schools for the elite, while the rest of the population gets sub-par education. So yeah, being able to book a doctor online is interesting only if there are doctors available.
Also, in the rest of the economy, one is forced to admit that web services are really underdeveloped - most shops don't have an online presence. Estonia's very good at PR, but most foreigners there (and some of the local population that lived abroad) will tell you it's mainly bs.
> You need to install some government software
It's open source and on github. Check out any of the ~50 repos https://github.com/orgs/open-eid/repositories --- not sure why this would be less trusted than any other open source software.
> The software UI is really crap.
I won't argue about the subjective taste of design, but at least the UI is Qt and not Electron.
> You get error messages in Russian
When you have it configured in English? Maybe. I can say that when configured to Estonian I've never seen any other language.
> You need to dump your cookies
Never heard of anyone having to do this. Sounds like a website specific issue anyway.
> Why do I need [my e-id] just to check my internet provider account?
Because you can sign binding legal agreements without leaving your home. It's convenient.
> A friend got a tax inspection because his supermarket card was linked to his e-id and he was seemingly spending more than what he was getting paid for his job.
This sounds like some grade A conspiracy. There is no government agency whose job is to collect supermarket purchase data. Are you claiming there is some sort of shadow organization hidden somewhere that goes through this data? I would bet that the tax inspection happened for other reasons and this conspiracy theory is made up.
> Estonia has almost no public services
Is this hyperbole? Do you have an example of a public service that is missing?
> Healthcare is a joke here - you need to wait often more than 3 months to see a specialist, even in Tallinn.
Not if your case has a medical reason to be prioritized. You can also always pay and go to a private clinic.
> Kindergartens are very difficult to access without bribing the administration
I'll assume you mean getting your kid into one by access. Some districts do indeed have long waiting lists. However if you register as soon as your kid is born the problem goes away. The problem usually surfaces when young parents are unaware of the registration waiting list and then later expect to be immediately admitted. That is only possible with 3+ year olds. The waiting lists are real for younger ones.
The part about bribing is laughably false. Kindergarten administration doesn't have digital authorization to reorder the database, which is ran by different organizations. I guess maybe some kindergarten could take your kid "extra on the side" unofficially, but that's more like a special favor. There is no way to influence the actual registration list.
> There's a very opaque "elite school" system
Elite schools are like that in every country. Do you think an elite school would remain elite if it had general admission?
> most shops don't have an online presence
Are you talking about mom & pop stores? Because the biggest stores like Selver, Prisma, Rimi, Coop, Stockmann not only have an online presence but even do delivery. I think only Maxima doesn't do delivery, but still has an online listing of items.
--
To summarize, you listed so many things that to me feel clearly false that its rather weird. You're either one of the unluckiest people in Estonia or have an axe to grind. Either way I hope you'll do better in the future, because me and everyone else I know has a much happier life in Estonia than what you described. Cheers!
Would you install North Korea's open-source software on your computer?
The general security of the system has been compromised quite a few times already: https://news.err.ee/1608294000/ak-ria-unlikely-to-be-fined-o... Also, there was a case of a massive data leak following the loss of a hard drive in public transportation by a public servant. Maybe having all records online and collected (including citizen's DNA) isn't such a good idea?
> Never heard of anyone having to do this. Sounds like a website specific issue anyway.
My wife has the problem on her windows computer, I have it on a Mac, we found the issue on a forum, so yes it's clearly common.
> Because you can sign binding legal agreements without leaving your home. It's convenient.
I wonder how people can sign such legal agreements elsewhere in the world.
> This sounds like some grade A conspiracy.
That's what the tax agent told my friend. Given that you can use your e-id for payment and customer card, it doesn't sound so complex to understand, many other countries do the same.
> Is this hyperbole? Do you have an example of a public service that is missing?
Public services are way way too underfunded. Having an appointment with a doctor takes way too much time (months if you don't pay). Getting stuff like orthodonthy outside Tallinn is very complex. If you go to the public hospital at night, the urgency services are left to the bare minimum (I experienced this). All expats that had health problems here (including stuff like "birthing") have horror stories to tell - medecine is delivered like in the soviet times. It's no wonder Estonia has a sky-high rate of preventable diseases and mortality: https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/419457/...
Tallinn's administration is a joke. They don't do urban planning, so zones like Kalamaja get overbuilt, with almost no shops, roads get crowded (or just free-for-all parking spaces with 0 enforcement), they don't plan for schools, and so on. Mismanagement is the norm, and don't get me started on the electric scooter anarchic situation - walking in the street is as stressful as it gets.
Can we talk about the fact that snow and ice isn't removed from the sidewalk, causing several injuries each year?
> I'll assume you mean getting your kid into one by access. Some districts do indeed have long waiting lists. However if you register as soon as your kid is born the problem goes away. The problem usually surfaces when young parents are unaware of the registration waiting list and then later expect to be immediately admitted. That is only possible with 3+ year olds. The waiting lists are real for younger ones.
Please don't bullshit on this one. Yes, you can get a spot in a kindergarten 45 minutes-away from where you leave, or get an allocation (which won't be enough) to put your kid into a private one. However, if you want to be in one near your home, no luck - unless you bribe. I know, many, many people who did it, so think what you want.
Also, "However if you register as soon as your kid is born the problem goes away." - We did it, our kid was 500 places away in the waiting list the day after he was born. So, no, it doesn't go away, because you don't have enough room for all kids. Simple as this.
> Elite schools are like that in every country. Do you think an elite school would remain elite if it had general admission?
Again, typical lie I hear here. The entrance exam is done at 6 years old, but school isn't compulsory before, so it relies on the parent's education and knowledge on how to game it. The exam is quite opaque, as it's not standardized, it's recommended to attend a "prep school" before (the private ones whith the elite school teachers being the best, hehe), and schools are only in Tallinn.
When Public Acts like Private: the failure of Estonia’s school choice mechanism https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/eerj.2014.13.2.... good article about it. You have a mention at the end that "private donations" help.
If you can game easily the system by having insider's info, it's not "elite" any more I'm afraid.
> Are you talking about mom & pop stores? Because the biggest stores like Selver, Prisma, Rimi, Coop, Stockmann not only have an online presence but even do delivery. I think only Maxima doesn't do delivery, but still has an online listing of items.
Yeah, given that Estonia has very very few shops in general, I'm talking about the medium-to-smaller ones. Just to recall, Estonia's narrative is that it's a very advanced IT country - in really, it's really not that.
Sorry to break the carefully-chiseled narrative, but I really think Estonia should recognize that a lot of things are wrong, to solve them and have a new start. Maybe Estonians would have a much nicer society, youngsters would stop to leave and mental health problems would decrease a bit.
But as far as I understand the main value proposition might be for non-EU citizens to be able to open a business in the EU remotely with access to the EU market, banking system etc
(1) see the section about “inbound Tätigkeit” here https://www.dittmann-hartmann.de/Fachgebiete/Gesellschaftsre...
I knew people doing this without reporting their foreign company income to their local tax authorities, but if they catch you you're looking at severe fines and possibly jail time. I knew a British guy living in Sweden making money from his UK company without fully paying Swedish taxes on his gain from the UK. He later got slapped with a equivalent ~80k Euros fine by the Swedish tax authorities. Turns out, governments don't like you cheating your tax dues.
Legally avoiding taxes in the EU is pretty difficult for the average person without completely relocating to a tax heaven.
So be careful and hire dedicated tax attorneys with experience in international/EU tax laws before you think you're clever and dream of dodging taxes like you're Amazon all on your own.
If you live in Germany but operate a UK company and all those profits never leave the UK, then you'll pay no German tax on those gains. But if you were to take those profits from the UK to use in Germany, then the German gov will want a sizable piece of your foreign gains.
From my limited understanding this is wrong and you should consult a tax advisor before attempting do set this up. “Ort der Geschäftsleitung” (smth. like “location where business decisions are made”) seems do be a recurring topic when it comes to taxation of foreign companies in Germany. They might argue you are “unbeschränkt steuerpflichtig” in Germany. (You owe taxes just like if your company was registered there.)
Paying taxes in the Netherlands, doesn't absolve you from also being taxed in your home country, if that's where your profits from the Netherlands will end up eventually.
So, for me the uncertainity and tax complications were at the end not worth the upsides of less bureacracy to register an Estonian legal entity.
If the customer(s) of your business are in Spain, then you would almost certainly find it least complicated to setup a business in Spain. As a legal resident of Spain, you are already required to pay taxes there.
From what I've seen, the tax rates quickly surpass those of the US; so you'll pay all your taxes to Spain and owe the US nothing (although of course you still have to file).
However... if your customers or clients are US based, then you could setup an LLC in a favorable state like Wyoming (you can search on this topic of course; and my serious search resulted in Wyoming seeming to be best). Then your US clients will not face any perceived or real obstacles in doing business with you; and your tax work should be easier (getting qualified help).
It's like blaming her for a compromise on her website. Do you think she has any idea that her wordpress (example) was an old version?
This isn't different from just being in the country you're in, companies usually don't pay vat on resources they use. And it only applies if you're using your car for business purposes only, otherwise it's 20% cheaper because you're committing tax fraud.
Also, it's Trinidad and Tobago.
I did use an accountant for filing my company’s annual accounts and taxes, though when I was a sole trader I just used the HMRC tax website to file. Far simpler than any of the options I’ve tried in the US, even as a regular employee (which you usually don’t have to file anything for in the U.K.)
Is this accurate?
The guy who talked about it was an angel investor and is not really impressed with Estonian e-residency anymore.
OK, so this doesn't seem to offer an end-run around Brexit for a UK national.
Similarly, (non-eu) expats who moved to Estonia with a D-visa but have not received their residency permits yet cannot get a bank account until they receive so.
Also corporate tax rates are veery low there compared to most other European countries (this this is the case in most of Eastern Europe)
So talk to a specialized tax accountant who know their stuff (and that won't be cheap).
One thought I had was that I could live modestly, pay myself a fraction of what the company takes in, let my company take advantage of Ireland's famously low corporate tax rates and invest accordingly, and then cash out, perhaps after moving somewhere without 52% taxes on all income over (70-90k depending on spouse, kids, etc.)
Alas, I am not the first person to think of this. The Close Company Surcharge effectively means I have to pay out on a given timeline and as such incur an income tax liability.
Does Ireland not have some form of expatriation tax? In Germany, this doesn't work, because they'll tax you "as if" you've sold your company at the time of emigration.
Most jurisdictions in most areas of the law have very successfully ensured that you can't evade their laws by just doing some paperwork to get some flag of convenience.
Estonian e-residency amounts to a piece of paperwork by which you voluntarily put yourself under Estonian jurisdiction for certain things.
However, the difficult piece is never putting yourself under a jurisdiction that you like. The difficult piece is getting yourself out of a jurisdiction that you don't like but that your business happens to be connected to somehow through real-life circumstances.
If you don't manage the latter, all you've done is to create unnecessary complication. Even if Estonian e-residency is super thin in admin overhead, it just amount to admin overhead you wouldn't otherwise have had at all, plus complicating the admin overhead you are facing in your home jurisdiction.
In any case you have to declare revenue and ownership, or commit tax fraud.
Consider that in some countries (eg Italy) running a foreign legal entity but being based in the country means that said legal entity must pay taxes in the country.
So I have frankly never understood what eResidency is for, as you will still have all liabilities for the country you are in.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
You can find blog post from him where he shares his experience after one week and one month
That said, their Digital Nomad visa application was entirely digital, and didn't have clear options for someone who didn't need a visa to enter the country/enter without invitation. As a Canadian passport holder, somehow this made it more difficult to fill out and understand. I ended up with a lot of null fields when I filled it out. Would have had to stop at the local police office to finalize it, given the issues I had.
It really is a beautiful country. And today is the first day of snow :)
My main complaint is that the remote worker visa gives you the right to stay in Estonia...and nothing else. You don't get an Estonian ID which is necessary for all sorts of things like setting up internet, getting a local phone number, or getting books from the library, and you can't get a bank account to pay your rent. LHV, Coop and SEB all claimed I could open an account with just my passport and lease agreement, but denied my application (after paying several hundred in application fees). The e-resident card is basically useless.
The tax situation is unclear. You become a tax resident when you stay over 183 days. But all US citizens are tax residents of the USA, so the USA-Estonian tax treaty kicks in with its tie breaker rules. Because I have a house in the USA, it means I would be treated only as a tax resident of the USA, so I would only pay taxes there...I think? But I can't imagine why Estonia would offer this visa program if they weren't getting something out of it.
The country is divided between Russians and Estonians, and foreigners. Estonian politics revolve around picking on Russians. It's sometimes a bit comical: Estonian schools don't have enough teachers for Estonian speakers, because of lack of planning and funding, and now they want to ban russophone schools. Russophones are forced to "learn the language" (one of the most complex in the world) while being soft-excluded from the society. Anyway, Estonians don't really enjoy speaking with less-than-fluent Estonian speakers and will switch to english or try to make humiliating corrections, so picking the language is quite hard here.
People won't hold the door if you have a kid in the arms, doctors won't be nice to you, there's absolutely no culture of service. You have systematically to send emails, calls, in-person visits to get things done, or get paid. It's not me being nice, every local will tell you the same thing we he stops pumping the "Estonia is nordic" meme (it's not, it's a post soviet society with 0 public services).
Advice: don't go to Estonia. It's no wonder one fifth of the population already left.
There is nothing about banning Russian language schools. It's about shifting state funding from Russian language to Estonian language. Privately funded Russian schools can keep operating. It's also not out of the blue, this has been talked about for over 30 years now. The latest developments are also still just more talk, no actual action has happened.
As for the culture of coldness, that is true. That also means though that if someone is nice to you, it's genuine. I personally much prefer this truthfulness to the USA style of fake niceness.
Please read those articles from the State-sponsored media: https://news.err.ee/1608774058/julianna-jurtsenko-switch-to-...
https://news.err.ee/1608751774/deputy-mayor-language-transit...
Also, there are plans to prevent russian-speaking people to enter politics. This is a problem in places like Narva where 99% of the population speaks Russian. https://news.err.ee/1608778132/ministry-calls-for-assessing-...
As for the experience, downs:
- Cold+wind.. Not as cold as Reykjavik or as windy as Helsinki, but when these get together in Estonia, it's the worst.
- I definetely miss socializing, especially when compared to countries like Spain or UK. Less interaction makes a less pleasant day and even less pleasant hospital experience.
- As Estonian's doesn't socialize or talk much, it's much harder to learn the language by practicing-living here
- Many brands or services not here. Estonia is usually one of the last countries in EU to receive some brands or services. Ie Apple products, official Apple store, HBO+.
- Also not many options for global companies to work
- Travel options are limited. Flights are longer, more expensive and less frequent.
- Maybe few other things that I cannot remember atm
- Digital mindset and almost non-existent bureaucracy. Both gov and private e-services very fast, transparent, digital, accessible. So far, I've done many I've applied for a bank account, multiple university applications and admissions, residency permit and driving licenses renewals, employment and rental contracts etc.
- Nature and silence, even in the middle of the city.
- Trust in the government, police and legal system - Address in Estonia
- A contact person from Estonia (resident or citizen)
How is the outlook of Estonia in startup scene? (how the world perceive Estonian startups)
Mind you, I still have to deal with my state's institutions for reporting taxes (and what have you), but at least I don't have to manage a company here. It can involve a lot of running around and being present, whereas with an Estonian company I could move at any point to another EU country without having to think of ever having to come back and deal with company related stuff (sure, I could officially delegate someone to do that on my behalf, but those are just complications for complications sake).
[0] https://www.riigiteataja.ee/en/eli/513072022006/consolide#pa...
This e-resident is mostly a way for Estonia to lower the barrier in creating a company in Estonia (and therefor having access to the E.U common market). This is a clever move because it attract start-up and smaller companies (who tend to be more afraid of paperwork) in Estonia rather than another E.U country, which means they will pay taxes to Estonia instead of Germany, France, ...