🇱🇹 Lithuania

Lithuania's population peaked at 3.7M in 1990 and now sits at 2.9M — a 22% collapse driven almost entirely by emigration of working-age adults to the UK, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. The 'moderate' youth unemployment rate (12.2%, trending sharply up to 17.4%) grotesquely understates the dysfunction: those who couldn't find work simply left, and the most capable, English-speaking, mobile young people left first — exactly the cohort any AI transition would depend on. Median age of 44.6 and a 32.1% old-age dependency ratio confirm the surviving population is aging rapidly while the tax base and innovation capacity drain away. Post-Brexit return migration provided a temporary demographic reprieve, but the underlying trajectory remains: Lithuania is exporting its AI-ready workforce to countries that will use them to build the automation tools that finish the job.

Lithuania has rolled out a national AI strategy and various digitalisation initiatives, but as a small economy its actual industrial policy capacity is dwarfed by Western member states. EU recovery funds are being channelled into digital skills and fintech promotion, but the country lacks the fiscal muscle to fund meaningful reskilling at scale. The strategy amounts to: attract tech investment, hope the young stay, pray AI doesn't notice we're already hollowed out.