Lithuania is a member of the European Union and the biggest economy among three Baltic states. GDP per capita reached USD 17,800 in 2008 and was higher than the ones of all its neighbors – Latvia, Poland, Russia and Belarus.

GDP per capita in Lithuania is 70% above the world's average of US$10,500. Lithuania has a favorable legislative basis for business as the country is ranked the 3rd in the region of Eastern Europe and Central Asia and the 26th in the world by the Ease of Doing Business Index prepared by the World Bank Group. Lithuania is ranked the 30th out of 179 countries in the Index of Economic Freedom, measured by The Heritage Foundation. According to the Human Development Report 2011, Lithuania belongs to the group of very high human development countries.

Having moved away from central planning system in the late 1980s, in 1990, Lithuania was the first to break away from the Soviet Union and become an independent capitalist economy. Lithuania soon implemented liberal reforms and became one of the fastest growing countries in the world last decade, as GDP growth rate was positive 9 years in a row till 2009. It enjoyed high growth rates after entering the European Union along with other Baltic states, leading to the notion of a Baltic Tiger. Current excellent telecommunication infrastructure and well-educated, multilingual workforce give the possibility to provide high quality business services and produce manufacturing products worldwide.

Lithuania (ⁱ/ˌlɪθuːˈeɪniə/ or /ˌlɪθjuːˈeɪniə/; Lithuanian: Lietuva), officially the Republic of Lithuania (Lithuanian: Lietuvos Respublika) is a country in Northern Europe, the largest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark. It borders Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, and a Russian exclave (Kaliningrad Oblast) to the southwest. Lithuania has an estimated population of 3.2 million as of 2011, and its capital and largest city is Vilnius. The Lithuanians are a Baltic people, and the official language, Lithuanian, is one of only two living languages (together with Latvian) in the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family.

For centuries, the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea was inhabited by various Baltic tribes. In the 1230s the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, who was crowned as King of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the first Lithuanian state, on 6 July 1253. During the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe: present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia were territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With the Lublin Union of 1569, Lithuania and Poland formed a voluntary two-state union, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth lasted more than two centuries, until neighboring countries systematically dismantled it from 1772 to 1795, with the Russian Empire annexing most of Lithuania's territory.

Dalia Grybauskaitė (pronounced [ˈdaːlʲæ ɡʲrʲiːbɒʊsˈkaɪtʲeː], born 1 March 1956) is the current President of Lithuania, inaugurated on 12 July 2009. She had previously been Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Finance Minister, and European Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget. Often referred to as the "Iron Lady" or the "Steel Magnolia", Grybauskaitė is Lithuania's first female head of state.

Grybauskaitė was born on 1 March 1956 in a working-class family in Vilnius. Her mother, Vitalija Korsakaitė (1922–1989), was born in the Biržai region and worked as a saleswoman; her father, Polikarpas Grybauskas (1928–2008), worked as an electrician and driver. Grybauskaitė attended Salomėja Nėris High School. She has described herself as not among the best of students, receiving mostly fours in a system where five was the highest grade. Her favourite subjects were history, geography and physics.

Grybauskaitė began participating in sport at the age of eleven, and became a passionate basketball player. At the age of nineteen, she worked for a year at the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Society as a staff inspector. She then enrolled in Saint Petersburg State University, then known as Zhdanov University, as a student of political economy. At the same time, she began working in a local factory. In 1983, Grybauskaitė graduated with a citation and returned to Vilnius, taking a secretarial position at the Academy of Sciences. Work in the Academy was scarce, however, and she moved to the Vilnius Party High School, where she lectured in political economy and global finance. Between 1983 and 1990 she was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1988, she defended her PhD thesis at Moscow's Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (now the Russian Academy of State Service).

Steve H. Hanke is an American economist specializing in international economics, particularly monetary policy.

He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Earlier in his teaching career, he taught economics at the Colorado School of Mines and the University of California, Berkeley. As of 2005^[update], he is a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1981 and '82, during the Reagan administration, he was a Senior Economist on the Council of Economic Advisors. In 1995 and '96 he served as an advisor to Domingo Cavallo, the Minister of Economy of Argentina. He has also held formal economic-advisory positions with Uruguay and four countries in eastern Europe, especially Bulgaria where the Lev is pegged successfully to the Euro through a Currency board that he created. In 1997 he began writing his "Point Of View" columns for Forbes magazine. In 1998 he became special counselor to the Economic and Monetary Resilience Council of Indonesia, and continues in that role as of 2005^[update].