Estonia has already experienced many benefits of increasing international integration, most obviously in significant convergence. From the Russian crisis in 1998 to the great recession in 2009 Estonia gained an impressive 20% relative to the EU27 average GDP per capita in PPPs. Similar to the other Baltic economies, however, a considerable part of earlier convergence gains was lost in the crisis, aggravated due to the collapse of world trade. While this was also true for Ireland, central European catching up countries like Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia have been less affected by the crisis and could maintain most of their convergence gains. Nevertheless, prior to the recession Estonia’s gap in income and productivity levels compared with the EU average were still around 30% and as the country emerges from recession it faces major policy challenges to maintain its pre-crisis rate of growth potential. The greater focus on closing the productivity gap in manufacturing-for-exports of other transition countries may serve as an interesting benchmark in order to get more out of globalisation.