News

The Foresight Centre notes in its newly published yearbook that better targeted preventive services would help to control the social costs that come with the aging population. However, more efficient use of people’s data requires legal clarity regarding the permissibility of data use.

Nearly half of the students in Estonia do not attend the primary school closest to their home and almost 60% do not go to the upper secondary school of their residence. According to the short report ‘Estonian Internal Educational Migration in General Education’ by the Foresight Centre, large-scale domestic educational migration indicates that many families are looking for higher quality education and reject the schools closest to their home.

A recent short report by the Foresight Centre shows that in the coming years, there will be an increasing need to involve foreign workforce in the Estonian healthcare system. Also, the proportion of healthcare workers who work in the private sector and in multiple jobs keeps growing, which in turn reduces the national healthcare system’s capacity and increases patient waiting times.

This year, the Foresight Centre researches the accessibility of local services. For this, the spatial data is analysed in order to assess the distance of the most essential services from people’s homes. The efficiency of municipalities is also analysed in order to get an overview of how effectively the available resources are used.

In Estonia, hobby education is more accessible to children of more educated and wealthier parents and mainly in Harju, Tartu and Pärnu counties. Ensuring the accessibility of hobby education for children with special educational needs and more difficult socioeconomic backgrounds is a major challenge according to the Foresight Centre’s short report ‘Accessibility of hobby education in Estonia’.

The Foresight Centre conference ‘The personalised state in Estonia: future directions, risks and opportunities’ discussed the opportunities of personalisation of state services and benefits and focused on risks involved in using people’s data.

A report from the Foresight Centre shows that half of Estonian residents support linking benefits to income. Need-based benefits are more favoured by older people and those with lower income, while younger age groups and parents of minor children are less supportive of them.

According to the Foresight Centre’s short report “Green investment trends of companies in Estonia and Europe”, Estonian companies’ involvement in green investment is similar to the rest of Europe, although considerably fewer companies invest in energy production.

According to the new report by the Foresight Centre, attracting industries with high energy consumption to Estonia requires the added value of the projects per unit of energy to not be lower than the average. Establishing energy-intensive industries would only be justified if they could bring opportunities for economic activities that would create more added value in Estonia.