When the bustle of Bergen, a large Norwegian city on the country’s west coast, recedes into the night, Inese Liepina and her husband Peteris go to work. Around midnight, Peteris stacks about 1,000 newspapers into Ineses trunk, and about 6,000 into his own. He then gently lifts his wife into her car. As he watches her drive off, he has a lot of worries on his mind. Inese is not used to driving the steep hills of Norway. The chronic pain in her back flares up, as she gets in and out of the car to climb the 12-story bloc apartment buildings to deliver heavy newspaper packets.

When a year ago, Dzintra Briede got divorced, lost her job and all of her income, this mother of four moved in with her father, who lives in the small village of Bunka, in the Western Latvia. Turns out that in this region of Latvia, Dzintra’s family is considered “rich.”

Latvia’s painful austerity program and recent economic growth is presented to the world as a success story and a model for other struggling countries resisting cuts. Re:Baltica’s investigation finds that Latvia has some of the highest poverty, unemployment and income inequality rates in the EU. What can other countries learn from Latvia to avoid the high human costs of its political choices?