Estonia has returned to first place in Emerging Europe's ranking of investment promotion agencies (IPAs), an annual assessment now in its ninth year covering 31 agencies across Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Estonia scored 89.71 percent, narrowly ahead of Moldova on 88.24 percent, which took second place.
According to Emerging Europe, Latvia, the highest-ranked country of the past two years, fell to joint third place with Czechia and Lithuania, all three scoring 86.76 percent. At the other end of the table, Romania's IPA scored lowest, at 30.88 percent, behind Albania on 38.24 percent and Tajikistan, last year's lowest-ranked agency, which improved to 44.12 percent.
This year's methodology shifted the weighting toward what Emerging Europe calls “reinvention” capacities, scored across seven categories, as a response to the limits of relying only on cost, location, talent and incentives to attract investment. On that point, Emerging Europe writes: What foreign firms really appreciate in the country, however, is minimal bureaucracy and a digital state
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The piece also notes that Invest Estonia supported investment decisions worth 431 million euros in 2025, helped along by a new large-scale investment grants scheme, a scheme whose threshold has since come down to 70 million euros. Separately, it says a Riigikogu committee in May gave its backing to a bill setting up an express lane for strategic investments, a response to complaints from business leaders that planning takes too long.
Emerging Europe says the three Baltic states all placed among the top five countries in this year's ranking, which it takes as evidence that the region as a whole remains a leader in investment promotion.
Source: Emerging Europe, . The text above is our own summary; the words in quotation marks are the source's.
What this means for an Estonian entrepreneur
Since independent assessors again rate Estonia's low bureaucracy and digital state as its strongest draw for foreign investors, a company planning its first move into Estonia can expect registration and basic set-up steps to go faster here than in many other markets, and should plan to use that speed, for example by starting from a ready-made company instead of waiting for a new one to be registered.
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