July 04, 2016
The folks at National Public Radio assume you all know the answer to that question. Why else would they tell listeners in a piece on migrant workers in the UK after the Brexit vote that:
“Analysts estimate that Lithuanian workers abroad send home more than $300 million a year.”
Hmmm, is that a big deal for Lithuania’s economy? If you had to look up Lithuania’s GDP to answer that question, you probably weren’t alone among NPR listeners. The IMF tells us that Lithuania’s GDP will be around $43 billion for 2016, which means that the $300 million in annual wages being repatriated is equal to roughly 0.7 percent of the country’s GDP.
If harsher immigration rules caused this sum to be cut back by a third or even half, that would be bad news for Lithuania’s economy, but not the sort of thing that is likely to send it into a recession. Anyhow, it would not have taken NPR’s reporters too much time to look up Lithuania’s GDP so that they could have presented a meaningful number to their listeners. As it is, they could have just saved some time by leaving this number out altogether. They were not providing information with it.
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