🇱🇹 Lithuania

Lithuania is the textbook brain drain case study: population peaked at ~3.7M in 1990, collapsed to ~2.8M after 2004 EU accession sent hundreds of thousands to the UK and Ireland, with current 2.9M reflecting only modest return migration during COVID. Rising youth unemployment (15.2% → 17.4% trend) understates the real dysfunction — the denominator is shrinking as the most mobile young adults continue exiting to Dublin, London, and Berlin. Median age 44.6 and old-age dependency at 32.1% mean the working-age cohort propping up taxes and the IT sector is itself thinning out, leaving AI-exposed white-collar work to a population that is simultaneously aging and emigrating.

Lithuania talks a good digital game with Vilnius tech hubs and EU recovery-funded digitalisation programmes, but has no industrial-scale AI strategy, no retraining infrastructure for displaced workers, and no plan B if its laser tech and fintech niches get commoditised. The country is too small and fiscally constrained to mount meaningful adaptation — the strategy is essentially 'hope the EU pays for it and hope our diaspora sends euros home.'