Andorra

Andorra is a nice quiet little micronation lodged in between Spain and France. Its people seem to have a lot going for them nowadays: employment rates are around 100%, as are its literacy rates.  Because of its status as a "free port" (i.e. low or no tariffs), Andorra has been a good place for citizens of the European Union to go and purchase cheap consumer goods, especially tobacco products. This has been due to the country's unique relationship to its neighbors. Being a sort of dependency of France and Spain meant that Andorra had open borders with them; not being in the E.U. meant that it didn't have to erect the same trade barriers as that large organization. This situation has been abetted by improved transportation routes through the Pyrenees which has led to increased numbers of tourists (hikers during the summer, skiers during the winter). It's status as a banking tax haven sure has helped its economy, too.

Andorrans, man

Andorra has managed to survive all of Europe's kerfuffles almost completely unscathed. Napoleon didn't even bother to annex it to France until 1812, and its not like it was all that far from Paris. During WW1, Andorra did its part for the war effort and dutifully declared war on Germany. But because nobody really cared, Andorra wasn't invited to participate in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. This resulted in World War 1 finally ending in 1958 when someone finally noticed and peace between Andorra and West Germany broke out. On the positive side, Andorra served a conduit for people fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe during WW2 (easy to enter from France, easy to leave to Spain). It was essentially Andorra's age-old tradition of smuggling put to a good use. Good job, Andorra!

Albania

Albania. Poor, poor Albania. Created at the turn of the last century by European powers wishing to break up the decrepit Ottoman Empire, at first it really wasn't that more underdeveloped than its neighbors. They were all places that could have served as the filming location of "Frankenstein": largely unpaved roads, lack of amenities such as electricity, hospitals, schools, etc.

Albanian Town Hall Meeting

Now flash forward a few decades. After World War Two, Eastern Europe developed itself in competition with the West. Albania, led by Enver Hoxha, lagged far behind and ended up isolating itself from virtually every other nation on Earth. Its people had no experience with capitalism and when the government in the early 1990s finally began to open up to privatization, most Albanians didn't understand that a "safe" route to investment in their future involved saving money in banks. Instead, they began to invest in pyramid schemes which promised very high rates of return. 
By the late 1990s, around 2/3 of the population was involved in the several Ponzi schemes active in Albania. Leaders of the schemes were frequently seen in the media & at events involving politicians, so most people thought that they were investing in something that was state-sanctioned and therefore a safe thing. Shortly thereafter, the bubble inevitably collapsed. Try imagining a situation where 2/3 of a country's population has lost all of their savings. They might get a little upset, to say the least, especially since it was the corruption of the more-savvy politicians that allowed these schemes to proliferate. Across the country, especially in the south, police & armed forces lost control of town after town. The people raided the police stations and armories and armed themselves. Thousands of people fled the violence on boats across the 40 mile wide Strait of Otranto to Italy. It took a multinational force five months to quell the violence.

Albania in 1997

Nowadays Albania has been showing improvements in both its economic and its democratic situations. It has tried very hard to ignore the irridentist elements of transnational Albanians in Macedonia, Greece, and Kosovo in order to further ingratiate itself with NATO (which it has since joined) and the E.U.

By the way, all those arms "liberated" by the people? There's a good chance they made their way over the border into Kosovo.

Kosovo: like Albania but with more guns

Antigua & Barbuda

Antigua & Barbuda is a small two-island nation, formerly British, that lies among the Leeward Islands. Like most of those islands, the early years of the islands' settlement was a story of sugar, slavery and rebellion. The smaller Barbuda (Spanish for "bearded") was primarily used as both a source of foodstuffs and a nursery of slaves for other Caribbean islands.

During the post-World War Two era, Vere Bird, member of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union, was elected to the local parliament. This started a career in politics that was to last until 1994. Starting off as rather a radical figure, Bird by the late 1960s had drifted rightward as he sought to maintain a position of influence as the territory moved toward independence, which came in 1981. Post-independence, Antigua struggled to find sources of income. Tourism was, and is, a mainstay, but is subject to fluctuations in the American economy and the government is often accused of not promoting the country enough internationally. Also, sugar exports don't bring in much money anymore. And so, Bird and his Antigua Labour Party came to allow the use of the country as an off-shore banking site. This continued after Bird's son, Lester Bryant Bird, assumed the prime minister-ship of the country. As a result, money-laundering became a problem, to the extant that the U.K. in 1999 issued an advisory to its financial institutions about the Antiguan banking situation.

But if you really want to see how Antigua's lax banking laws came to screw up the country, please examine the case of Allen Stanford. Born in Texas, his first off-shore banking adventure, on Montserrat resulted in his relinquishing his banking license in the British territory. Not wanting to go back to America's high tax rates, he therefore moved on to Antigua. Throwing his money around liberally (his net worth of over 2 billion dollars dwarfed the Antiguan economy), soon Stanford was rumored to even be sitting in on cabinet meetings. Eventually, Stanford became the country's largest employer. Buying huge amounts of land, he built a hospital, a cricket stadium, banks (off-shore and regular), owned a newspaper, and even had his own private security- and custom-free terminal at the local airport so that his guests could rapidly enter the country and dine at his gourmet restaurant The Sticky Wicket. Knighted by the government of Antigua & Barbuda in 2006, Sir Allen Stanford had it all. Unfortunately, Stanford was running a Ponzi scheme, with a side business (possibly) of laundering money for Mexico's Gulf Cartel. And in 2009, it all came crashing down with his arrest in America (he is due to stand trial in January 2011). Because of Antigua's dependence upon this one man criminal to prop up its fragile economy, his downfall is putting the hurts on 70,000 people.

Hello World!

Hello world! Testing...1, 2, 3....Is it rolling, Bob?