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This report analyses the trends in Finnish productivity growth over the 2000s and 2010s. It describes its key features, makes comparisons to a benchmark of OECD countries, and studies the causes of its sudden and prolonged slowdown which began at the end of the 2000s. The analysis focuses on the role of two contemporaneous demand shocks that hit the Finnish economy and propagated through value chain linkages: the Nokia crisis, the main Finnish firm active in the computer and electronics sector, and the Great Trade Collapse of 2009. Matching detailed firm-based information on structural characteristics of productivity growth with global input-output tables and National Accounts data for 16 OECD countries, the report highlights how the prolonged drop in demand from the domestic computer and electronics sector may have induced a persistent drag on Finnish productivity growth. The Nokia crisis impacted the most productive firms of the supplier sectors, reducing productivity dispersion and lowering the allocative efficiency of resources. A sudden but short-lived shock to foreign demand, such as the one experienced during the Great Trade Collapse, may have large short-term effects on productivity, which nonetheless fade away within three years and do not affect structural features of the economy. The report concludes with policy implications to strengthen Finnish resilience to idiosyncratic shocks to key sectors or large firms, while supporting long-term productivity growth and competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-industrial money supply typically consisted of multiple, often foreign currencies. Standard economic theory implies that this entails welfare loss due to transaction costs imposed by currency exchange. Through a study of novel data on Finnish nineteenth-century parish-level currency conditions, we show that individual currencies had principal areas of circulation, with extensive co-circulation restricted to the boundary regions in between. We show that trade networks, defined here through the regional co-movement of grain prices, proved crucial in determining the currency used. Market institutions and standard price mechanisms had an apparent role in the spread of different currencies and in determining the dominant currency in a given region. Our findings provide a caveat for the widely held assumption that associates multi-currency systems with negative trade externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes how the boundary between necessary and unnecessary consumption items was defined in Finland in the years following World War II. On the basis of extensive comparative data, it focuses on the history of two items: the washing machine and the cellular phone. The data consist of press coverage and material published by manufacturers and consumer counseling organizations. The need for household appliances was invented, shaped, normalized, and legitimized through a social interaction process in which the media were a central vehicle. The data suggest that the need for novelties is interpreted though similar types of cultural modes, no matter what the product or type of cultural text. Thus, the entry of technology into the home in the postwar years was accompanied by a discussion flavored not only by technological determinism, but also by a form of social and cultural determinism manifested in deep-grounded conceptual distinctions, such as tools versus toys. The world-record pace at which Finnish consumers took up new technology in the postwar period provides illustrative evidence and new stimuli for evaluating the potential for digitalizing the home in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article evaluates the Finnish party and the electoral systems and some main reasons for the outcome and analyses the socio-demographic patterns of party support regarding the Finnish Parliamentary Election of 2019. It further discusses features of the Finnish political parties and the challenges facing them; changing economic structure of Finnish society which favored the National Coalition party; and decreasing number of working-class voters in the Finnish Social Democratic Party (SDP).

This article surveys and appends the available quantitative research on the interwar economic growth of Baltic countries to compare gross domestic product (GDP) (in 1990 Geary–Khamis dollars) growth in Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania between 1913 and 1938 in a broad international context. Finland's GDP per capita recovered to the 1913 level in 1923, in Estonia recovery was complete by 1922, in Lithuania by 1924, and in Latvia by 1924–1925. By high-end estimates, the growth performance of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was not weaker than Finland's. By 1938, the GDP per capita of all Baltic countries exceeded the level of the Soviet Union with the possible exception for Lithuania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Biodiversity is decreasing at an alarming rate. Current policies focus on the most valuable species and habitats but cannot stop the degradation occurring in less valuable habitats. One solution is offsetting the loss of biodiversity caused by development projects. The basic idea of biodiversity offsetting is simple: a developer must provide an improvement in biodiversity so that the lost ecological value is compensated for. A banking mechanism for offsetting entails a third party providing offsets for developers to purchase, and thus, an offset market emerges. We develop an equilibrium model to analyse the offset markets and apply the model to the Finnish economy and three selected boreal habitats. We examine how the market depends on trading ratios, the presence of an intermediary and the realization of risks associated with uncertainty. An intermediary can facilitate the market participants meeting each other with minimal transaction costs and safeguard against risks. The results show that the size of the offset markets could potentially be quite considerable and providing offsets could be a profitable business for landowners in Finland. The outcome of the restoration investment and a possible time delay between biodiversity losses and gains impact the trading ratios and thus, have a major impact on the market equilibrium. An intermediary may significantly decrease the costs of compensation for developers, provided that it can provide mature offsets when needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the bioeconomy has emerged as a key policy idea in liberal western states. This paper analyses the bioeconomy as a state strategy. By building on theoretical strands by Poulantzas, Moore, and Castán Broto, the paper argues that the bioeconomy has to be understood simultaneously as an accumulation strategy within the capitalist world‐ecology and as a transformative agenda through which tensions in the state space can be governed. The politics of bioeconomy do not concern its outright endorsement or rejection but the ways its contradictions are interpreted and articulated. The empirical part of the paper scrutinises the bioeconomy strategy adopted in Finland. Our main concern is that the bioeconomy strategy has been appropriated by the traditional forest industries in such a way that fails to address the problem of uneven development and ignores the potential of the bioeconomy as part of a transformative agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the World State of Quality (WSQ) project conducted by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) which compared and ranked European Union Countries based on their quality performance. Topics discussed include the multiscale framework for evaluating the performance of the countries, quality considerations for the project like micro, meso and macroquality and details on the results on the project where Finland, Austria and Sweden were the top scorers.

In this article, we investigate the redistributive outcomes of the Finnish pension system. We hypothesize that a pension system does not straightforwardly diminish, maintain, or increase income differences after retirement, but it can have different outcomes for different groups. Our focus is on differences in changes in income between groups that vary in their timing and type of retirement. We make use of longitudinal register-based data from the Finnish Centre for Pensions and analyze income and retirement trajectories of Finnish employees born in 1948 from the age of 57 to 66 (N = 44,449). Our aim is to find out in what way trajectories of income from earnings and pensions are related to different types of retirement trajectories, while controlling for gender, sector of employment, and length of working life. Eight distinct retirement trajectories are identified using sequence analysis. The results of our multilevel regression models indicate that the pension system sustains inequalities related to gender and employment sector. Early old-age retirement and part-time retirement are associated with higher earnings and more generous pension entitlements, indicating cumulative advantage. Lower earnings are associated with higher risk of early exit through unemployment and disability pensions, while the pension system guarantees a minimum income level in retirement, resulting in status leveling. Those who retire later are relatively well off in work, but worse off in retirement, suggesting a status-leveling outcome. By disentangling these outcomes of the pension system, it is possible to learn social policy lessons for other national institutional contexts as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Finnish Company Reorganization Act (FCRA) came into force on February 8, 1993. According to this legislation, a reorganization program may be undertaken in order to rehabilitate a distressed debtor's viable business, to ensure its continued viability, and to facilitate debt arrangements. This study concentrates on fourteen Finnish entrepreneurs who were accepted into the reorganization program between 2008 and 2010. The focus here is on the entrepreneurs' thoughts about their own behavior and their own character, and how these were connected to their economic decline, as well as their perceptions of their own strengths as entrepreneurs. The results indicate that these entrepreneurs' strengths and weaknesses can be divided into different categories concerning working habits and character. The reasons for the weaknesses were connected to external factors such as lack of funding, high expenses, and a recession. Other reasons included problems with the entrepreneurs' own behavior and personality. The insights into these Finnish entrepreneurs' difficulties could help new entrepreneurs in the beginning of their careers. Additionally, the results could be used in courses on entrepreneurship, for example, in relation to helping budding entrepreneurs to understand their potential weaknesses and how to avoid the risks inherent in self-management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on ageing consumers have mainly focused on chronological age and generational values or studied ageing and consumption with cross-sectional data. Few quantitative studies exist that examine the effect of age together with life course on consumption using longitudinal data. To bridge this gap, the article examines ageing and attitudes towards consumption in Finland, focusing particularly on late middle-agers (46-60 year-olds) in comparison with young adults (18-30 year-olds) between 1999 and 2014. The article explores three consumption patterns based on attitudinal statements: ecological, economical and self-indulgent consumption. Through analysis of a nationally representative survey study in Finland (N = 8,543), the article reveals that in all years under examination, late middle-agers reported more ecological attitudes towards consumption than young adults. In 1999 and 2004, the attitudes of late middle-agers appeared more economical, but age-related differences in economical attitudes disappeared between 2009 and 2014. In each year, late middle-agers reported less self-indulgent attitudes than young adults, and these age-related differences did not remarkably change between 1999 and 2014. The results indicate that in 1999 and 2004, ecological and economical attitudes towards consumption were best predicted by age at the year of the study. In later years, ecological attitudes were more closely determined by life course stage, that is household type and other socio-demographic determinants. Regarding economical attitudes, generational or cohort effects were pronounced among late middle-agers in 1999. In contrast, the significance of age remained throughout the years for self-indulgent attitudes, indicating the absence of generational or cohort effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finland is the only country in the world where all ports freeze over during a typical winter. Over the century 1878–1978, Finland developed a winter-seafaring system that broke the winter isolation and eliminated seasonal variation in shipping. By using diverse archival sources, we deconstruct the dominant narrative of Finnish winter seafaring through which national as well as technological development is often presented as natural, inevitable and straightforward. We reinterpret the Finnish winter navigation system as a tangible, historical experience and show that technological solutions in this domain cannot be understood outside the context of a decades-long process of nation-building. Finally, we argue that winter navigation became a central imaginary for Finland as a western, industrial and modern nation. As such, the Finnish winter-seafaring system presents a case of technological nationalism in which a small, peripheral country sought to integrate itself into a modern international order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Digitalisation is shaping almost every sector of the economy, enabling new ways of doing things, not merely digitising old, often manual, processes. Numerous new digital payment applications have emerged in retail payment markets, but the underlying payment infrastructures have remained almost unchanged. However, it is expected that technological advances combined with increasing competition enhanced by regulatory changes will shape retail payment markets in the coming years. With this evolving new environment will come new requirements, most notably for the authorities responsible for safeguarding the security, reliability and efficiency of payments. To analyse this challenge, this paper first reviews the theoretical framework that can be applied in examining the development of retail payment markets. Based on this, it outlines possible policy actions for the authorities. Secondly, it assesses the roles of authorities in practice, focusing on their position as catalyst for development in the European and national payment landscapes. Finally, it draws policy conclusions, emphasising the importance of multi-stakeholder cooperation bodies involving both payment service users and providers as well as relevant authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to elaborate on Forester's notion of the planner as a "deliberative practitioner", aiming to add sensitivity to the institutional conditions of planning, focusing especially on Finland. In terms of trust, the concept of deliberative practitioner mostly focuses on interpersonal trust as a planner's resource in mediating particular interests. Thereby, when applied to the Finnish context, institutional trust may be undermined as a key resource for the Finnish planner's jurisdiction, justifying his/her proactive role and authority in bringing broader concerns to the planning agenda. This undermining prevents the acknowledgement of important institutional resources that the Finnish planner has in coping with the tensions between communicative ideals and neoliberal realities. A more context-sensitive and institutionally responsive theory of communicative planning is needed to help the planning professionals and other stakeholders conceive the deliberative ideals as supportive for the planners' institutionally strong agency. Hence, the notion of the "deliberative bureaucrat". The article seeks to develop an outline for such a theory by drawing upon studies of legal culture, the sociology of professions, deliberative democracy theory and the concept of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Financial Politic & Economic Reviews / Finans Politik & Ekonomik Yorumlar is the property of Journal of Financial Politic & Economic Reviews / Finans Politik & Ekomomik Yorumlar and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The goal of the Finnish experiment that started this year is to try to get some evidence on how a new social policy instrument mimicking a basic income would work and what kind of behavioural consequences it would have. At this point, there are many strong arguments being made both in favour of and opposed to basic income. Unfortunately, there are not enough facts yet. The Finnish experiment hopes to change that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the European Union, smart specialization is an important concept in regional policy. Its primary aim is to achieve inclusive and sustainable economic growth. There is a lack of convenient region specific measures to operationalize smart specialization startegies (S3). The purpose of the paper is to find "indices of smart specialization" on a regional level. We propose indices that are based on (1) the rate of industrial diversification, (2) revealed comparative advantage and (3) regions' overall relative specialization. In the empirical part, we analyze smart specialization in Finland using structural data provided by Statistics Finland for seventy sub-regions (LAU1) and 24 sub-industries in manufacturing. These industries are the most important for exports, productivity, and regional economic performance for a small country. The following indices are used in empirical evaluations: Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for regional diversity, Balassa- Hoover Index (BHI) for revealed comparative advantage, and Region's Relative Specialization Index (RRSI) for aggregate regional specialization differences. The concept of smart specialization is related to these measures. Index analyses reveal that many growing sub-regions have similar comparative advantages. This means inter-regional synergy, and it enables opportunities for strategic cooperation between regions. To develop smart specialization strategies for Europe's regions, we need these kinds of empirical knowledge-based management tools and planning approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the legal regulation involved in building – and dismantling – the Nordic welfare state in Finland. Within this context this article details how legislative reforms have been reflected in the development of Northern Finland, as well as the effects on the Sami population and a comparison between Nordic countries. The Nordic welfare state was implemented in Finland primarily through parliamentary legislation. Human and fundamental rights played no role in the process of building the welfare state. The beginning of the 1990s marked the end of what had been massive build-up of the public sector. Over the last 20 years or so we have seen cutbacks in municipal services such as schools, healthcare centres, and social services. The future of municipal government in Finland looks very different than it did when the welfare state was being created. We may well be facing a bleak future with weaker municipalities, fewer public services, less state funding for municipalities, less manoeuvring space in relation to the state, and more privatisations. Wise structural reforms might be the way ahead if we want to create functional regional and local governance and thus to guarantee the future of the Nordic welfare state in Finland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central locations of metropolitan areas have some specific attributes, leading to an accumulation of large knowledge exchanges and extensive knowledge externalities, which encourage the concentration of various economic activities, especially knowledge-based industries (KBI). Other agglomeration economies found in metropolitan areas – such as telecommunications and transport infrastructures connected to global productive circuits and complementary labour markets – are key factors for KBI employment growth. This paper explores the Helsinki Metropolitan Area’s (HMA) spatial clustering of KBI at the sub-district level, and the role played by agglomeration economies (both specialization and diversity economies) in fostering this process. The results reveal that KBI employment shows patterns of concentration in the core and adjacent areas. The specialization and diversity economies found in the metropolitan core and the specialization economies found in others areas lead to KBI spatial clustering in the HMA. Public policies regarding the promotion of science parks have also played a decisive role. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The cadastral systems used in each country and region have developed through the centuries to their current form. We cannot assume that the current situation will remain the same from this point to the future. There are signs in recent studies and development projects throughout the world that those cadastral systems which are traditionally seen as well-functioning also need to be renewed as society changes at a rapid pace. This study is set up to analyze the future needs of a cadastral system and registers related to it in Finland. The objective of the study is to reveal future themes affecting the operational environment of the cadastral system by using research methods provided by futurology. The method used in this study is called environmental scanning and it consists of three phases: collecting events, recognizing phenomena and combining the phenomena as themes. The study analyses 352 literature sources and reveals 14 different future themes in the operational environment of the cadastral system, which are economic pressure, demographic changes, development of technology, transparent society, safety, environmental values, globalization, digitalization, know-how, quality, political change, soft values, public-private partnership and crowd sourcing. The future themes, their possible relations between each other and their significance for the cadastral system are analyzed by using the concepts of megatrends, trends, wild cards, driving forces and weak signals and reflecting the results to research made in the field of land management internationally. The results can be used when renewing a cadastral system, in order to consider possible future themes that may affect the system. Detecting and recognizing the future themes provides an opportunity to react and change the course of action in order to adapt to the future. The results are not only usable in the Finnish context, but can also be applied in other countries’ development of their cadastre and as part of environmental scanning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information gaps and asymmetries are common in the housing market and this is frequently the case with the risks of natural processes, especially in coastal areas where the amenity dimension may dominate the risk aspect. Flood risk disclosure through maps is a policy instrument aimed at addressing this situation. We assess its effectiveness by identifying whether such maps induce a price differential for single family coastal dwellings in three Finnish cities, and by estimating the discount per square meter for various flooding probabilities (return times). The estimations indicate a significant price drop after the information disclosure for properties located in flood-prone areas as indicated by the maps. In the case of sea flooding information in Helsinki, the price effect is sensitive to the communicated probability of flooding. Overall, the discussed policy instrument appears to have functioned as intended, correcting information gaps and asymmetries related to flood risk. The identified effect is spatially selective; it caused a short-term localized shock in market prices in conjunction with some reorientation of demand from risky coastal properties towards ones that represent a similar level of coastal amenity, but are less risky in terms of flooding. This hints at the potential for incorporating the shocks associated with flood events or risk information into broader-scoped urban modelling and simulation. Similarly, the reasonable accuracy with which the housing market processes the additional information shows a potential for wider use of the disclosure of non-obvious risks in real estate markets. In the case of adapting to climate change risks, additional uncertainties may make the disclosure instrument less effective, if used as a single tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay charts the history, nature and uses of Finnish historical household budget data. Three perspectives are discussed: that of the changing interests of the state in producing knowledge on households; that of the multiple interests of various societal actors in shaping household behaviour through budgeting, including the households themselves; and that of reanalysis for modern economic history. In the last instance, the main focus is on microeconometric perspectives. In the process, an overview of the sources available will be presented. To conclude, historically generated bias and future research potential of the sources are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The aim of this study was to assess the economic burden of fire-related injury from two perspectives: post-injury social security compensations and also productivity losses due to the lost productive time from a societal perspective induced by the injury. Design and methods: A cohort of 1503 inpatients who sustained firerelated injury during the period 2001-2005 was retrospectively followed up for 5-10 years until the end of 2010, using linkages between several administrative registers. The study process was started in 2015 and finalized on March 2016. Results: Annual productivity loss was on average EUR 5.72 million, giving a total for the five-year study period of EUR 28.6 million, with a mean value of EUR 19,070 per person. Mean/median disability time for those who received benefits was 572/63 days, ranging from 3 days to 36.5 years. Total average cost of benefits to the injured annually during the study period was EUR 1.03 million. This equates to EUR 3430 per patient for the whole cohort or EUR 14,860 for those who received benefits. Conclusions: The burden of fire-related injuries in terms of payment transfers and lost productivity due to periods of disability as indirect costs is high; in a population of 5.4 million, the annual loss exceeded EUR 5.7 million. The results could be used in planning preventive measures and therefore yield savings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nordost-Archiv: Zeitschrift für Regionalgeschichte is the property of Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Author-supplied Abstracts.)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine novel corporate governance-based determinants of risk disclosures among index-listed Finnish companies. Therefore the focus of the study is on explaining the board’s monitoring role in relation to corporate managers. Design/methodology/approach – Firms’ risk disclosures are analysed in terms of their Quantity and Coverage. The authors focus on two board characteristics not examined in prior related literature: first, non-executive board members’ self-interested financial incentives, measured by their share or option ownership, and annual compensation and second, non-executive board members’ competence, measured by their experience in the company and managerial capability proxied by prior education. The sample is composed of the OMXH-25-listed firms, representing the most traded and followed firms among Finnish publicly listed companies. Findings – The authors find that the risk disclosures of these firms can be explained by financial incentives (wealth and compensation) and competence-related factors (attrition rate and education). The results indicate that among the “best disclosers”, the narrative risk disclosures are, on average, on a high level, and variation in risk reporting is largely associated with board characteristics. Research limitations/implications – The relatively small sample size makes the results vulnerable to type two error. Further research could continue by examining the impact of board work on corporate disclosures across countries and disclosure items. Practical implications – Board members’ financial incentives and competence impact the dynamism of board work. In this way, they are also associated with board members’ disclosure decisions. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the extant literature by demonstrating the impact of previously unexamined board characteristics on the quality of the narrative risk disclosures of highly followed firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on Finnish time use data spanning the past three decades (1979-2010) with a focus on the prevalence of wage and salary earners' work at different locations, namely at the employer's facilities, at home, outside the home or the main place of work, and on the move. The diary data (N = 13,277) depicts respondents' time budgets in ten minute intervals around the clock. According to the results, work practices have remained surprisingly conventional. Although the absolute time spent at the respondents' main place of work has been decreasing, the vast majority of employees still work at their employer's facilities during normal business hours, lending no support to the 24/7 working society thesis. However, during a standard working week, alternating between different business facilities has become more common than before, pointing to the growing importance of distributed work arrangements. The data also shows that the share of employees working on days off has not increased, but this kind of activity has lengthened over the years by those who do it, implying that the burden of working time is divided more unevenly than before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the existence of the Malthusian preventive and positive checks in pre-industrial Sweden and Finland are studied using demographic and economic data from circa 1750–1860. By applying time series analysis, we are able to identify strong preventive and positive checks for Sweden. The preventive check is considered to work both directly through births and indirectly through marriages. Although the Finnish data also indicate the existence of the preventive check, the positive check is only detected with differenced data. Our findings contradict the initial hypothesis that, due to poverty, Finland would display a higher sensitivity of mortality to living standards than Sweden. Instead, the finding of a pronounced marriage-driven preventive check in Finland casts new light on the macro-level determinants of the check mechanisms and on their connectivity to wider societal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the challenges that arise when service innovations are being promoted through public procurement. The academic and policy debate on public procurement of innovation has recently been very vivid, but it has mostly focused on procurement of technologies and tangible goods while considerably less attention has been paid to public procurement of innovation in services. By drawing on conceptual tools from the literature on service innovation and public procurement of innovation, the paper examines an empirical case of procurement of social services for substance abusers carried out by the city of Helsinki, Finland. In particular, the article analyzes whether the characteristics of services and service innovation are compatible with processes and requirements of public procurement. The article shows that service innovations can be procured, but the features of services and service innovation such as intangibility, interactivity, and difficulty to measure the impacts of new services affect the procurement process and set particular requirements for it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many developed Western countries have seen rapid rises in personal debt and consumer credit during recent decades. Debt problems have become a widely recognized and common concern. This study analysed debt problems among the Finnish adult population from 2005 to 2013. Previous research on indebtedness and financial problems has relied on surveys, and studies using precise, register-based information about the most excluded social groups are needed. The primary data were based on a nationally representative random sample of 91 931 Finnish residents aged 19 to 65. The data contained information from several administrative registers, including information about debt enforcement. Low socioeconomic status, male gender, age, marital status, number of children, and prior criminal convictions were associated with debt problems. Income was not associated with the amount of outstanding private receivables, indicating that debt problems do not only boil down to social stratification and poverty. The younger age group had a higher prevalence of debt problems and higher amounts of both private and public receivables. Low levels of education predicted both higher prevalence of debt problems and higher amounts of outstanding receivables. The results underline the importance of understanding the social mechanisms of financial behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One imperfection in housing markets is imperfect knowledge about legal interests such as ground leases. Both actual reduced legal interest as well as uncertainty surrounding rights and future lease payments for houses constructed on leased land may affect prices relative to houses built on freehold land. We use regression analysis of sales prices of condominium transactions in Helsinki to examine the effect ground leases have on house prices. We find that prices on condominiums constructed on leased lots are discounted at least 5 %, on average. In addition, we see that the announcement of potentially large increases in base rents upon renewal contributes to the discount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female life expectancy is currently shorter in the United States than in most high-income countries. This study examines work-family context as a potential explanation. While work-family context changed similarly across high-income countries during the past half century, the United States has not implemented institutional supports, such as universally available childcare and family leave, to help Americans contend with these changes. We compare the United States to Finland--a country with similar trends in work-family life but generous institutional supports--and test two hypotheses to explain US women's longevity disadvantage: (1) US women may be less likely than Finnish women to combine employment with childrearing; and (2) US women's longevity may benefit less than Finnish women's longevity from combining employment with childrearing. We used data from women aged 30-60 years during 1988-2006 in the US National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File and harmonized it with data from Finnish national registers. We found stronger support for hypothesis 1, especially among low-educated women. Contrary to hypothesis 2, combining employment and childrearing was not less beneficial for US women's longevity. In a simulation exercise, more than 75 percent of US women's longevity disadvantage was eliminated by raising their employment levels to Finnish levels and reducing mortality rates of non-married/non-employed US women to Finnish rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to show how local industry life cycles impact the development of Finnish resource-based rural towns. This study reveals five long-term and overlapping industry cycles which were based on natural resources, assembly industries and service production. In general, the cycles have shortened over time. Transitions from cycle to cycle were enabled by the phases of resilience, which were highly dependent on political and economic processes at different scales. However, the political interventions of the last decades were unable to compensate for the disadvantages in competitiveness of this remote area and lay sustainable foundations for new industries. In the long run, the only exception has been the forest-related processing industry which has a capacity to renew its own operations and adapt to changing market situations. The results demonstrate the high significance of absolute advantage in rural development [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have often cherished the idea of cartels as the ‘children of depression’ in the interwar period. However, as this article discusses, recessions did not always boost cartelisation; sometimes they hindered it. This article explores for the first time the Swedish-Finnish timber export cartel between 1918 and 1921, and sketches out why the cartel worked best during rising demand and why the recession of 1921 killed it. The article is based on primary sources in the Swedish and Finnish archives. Research on cartel timing is used as the main theoretical framework in interpreting the material. Besides discussing how the direction of demand affected the dynamics in the Swedish-Finnish timber cartel, this article also analyses the roles that the governments and central banks played in the rise and fall of the cartel. The article shows that the direction of demand played a crucial role in the lifespan of the cartel, and argues that even without the involvement of the governments and central banks the cartel would still have been born and would have ultimately collapsed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This single case study describes the progress of an innovation and analyses the knowledge dynamics involved in the process. This is done by analysing the process from idea to product, identifying necessary knowledge types and knowledge phases, and identifying features of knowledge anchoring in the innovation process. Using the biography technique, this process was tracked and the related knowledge dynamics were described. This study will serve as an interesting benchmarking tool for both managers and public development agencies. The findings suggest that public actors should pay more attention in their service development to the case-specific needs of innovative start-ups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National ministries of agriculture and competent EU authorities currently have the reforms of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) high on their agendas in terms of planning and designing the upcoming programmatic period. Also subjected to this debate are the allocation of the budget to each pillar and their territorial impact. The interest of this article lies with two interrelated aspects. The first comprises an overview of the Pillar II budget and how this is allocated within EU member states. The second considers how these measures relate and contribute to the improvement of the socio-economic situation and the state of the environment in rural areas of the EU in general, and in Estonia and Finland in particular. Seemingly, the way funding has been allocated thus far, with a heavy focus on agriculture and directly related activities, is not appropriately suited to facilitate a holistic improvement of the state of rural areas of the EU, while it does not reflect the contemporary economic transition processes in these areas. In terms of protection of the agri-environment, Finland exhibits an unprecedented coverage of areas under environmental support measures, as a Pillar II component, while implementation of the same policy in Estonia results currently in the coverage of less than half of the potential areas. The imbalances in the two countries in terms of actual financial support per hectare are also considerable. To facilitate sustainable development in such areas as a whole, policy streaming should not be broken down into objectives to be reached via broad actions that address particular sectors, and it should not attend to the satisfaction of sectoral interests. Rural areas and their economies, in terms of sustainable development, should be approached in an integrated manner, enabling this process to advance in a holistic and territorial fashion, taking into account all the necessary dimensions of sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study estimates the level of intergenerational transmission of income in Finland and assesses the contribution of parental and personal socioeconomic and demographic characteristics to this relationship. We used a longitudinal register-based data set covering two decades and selected cohorts born between 1973 and 1976 for analysis. The results demonstrate strong intergenerationality, with those from the lowest and highest income quintiles being the most probable to remain in the same income quintile in adulthood. Approximately half of these associations are attributable to parental characteristics among men and by personal characteristics among women. Our results further show complex interactive effects, with higher-income parents unable to entirely protect their offspring from the negative impact that unemployment, single parenting, and living alone has on personal income levels. These findings demonstrate significant and multifaceted intergenerational continuities in income level even in a Nordic welfare state such as Finland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Motivated by the important role of trade in driving and reflecting economic transformation, we focus on the export structure of two small export-oriented economies, Ireland and Finland 2000-2009, from the perspective of the sophistication of both economies' exports, i.e., the extent to which high-value products characterise each country's export profile. The Product Space method is used as the basis of our comparison of the economies in terms of their sectors, activities, and structural transformation of the economies. The method focuses attention on the estimated density of the product space as evident in patterns of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) in goods exports. The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, as a significant export sector for both economies, is examined specifically to investigate its further export potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article scrutinises the role of structural change and foreign trade in the Nordic countries, except Iceland, in industrialization prior to 1914. Sector contribution to GDP as well as the role of the foreign trade is compared across the countries. The comparison uncovers different paths to industrialization that cannot be explained by reference to received views, such as the shock of free trade or open economy forces. Denmark was not only richer than the rest of the ‘Nordic Periphery’ but also earlier in industrialization. Furthermore, agriculture had a much neglected role in Swedish catch-up, and despite its relatively large export sector, Norway lagged behind, as did Finland. Economic growth was characterised not only by rising exports but also by capital imports and increasing consumption, indicating wider economic and social change. Different sector structures in the Nordic countries largely explain why there was no clear pattern of catch-up or convergence, neither in the region nor in relation to the Western European leaders. We conclude that the social capability of the Nordic countries to integrate and respond to external influences 1850–1914 must be seen in the perspective of the evolving domestic markets and the prior establishment of market institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigated time patterns of post-divorce excess mortality. Using register-based data, we followed 252,641 married Finns from 1990 until subsequent date of divorce and death until 2003. Among men, excess mortality is highest immediately after divorce, followed by a decline over 8 years. Among women, excess mortality shows little variation over time, and is lower than among men at all durations of divorce. Social and economic factors—largely adjustment for post-divorce factors—explain about half of the excess mortality. This suggests that excess mortality is partly mediated through poor social and economic resources. Mortality attributable to accidental, violent, and alcohol-related causes is pronounced shortly after divorce. It shows a strong pattern of reduction over the next 4 years among divorced men, and is high for only 6 months after divorce among divorced women. These findings emphasize the importance of short-term psychological distress, particularly among men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies and explains two very different pathways to a knowledge economy, based on investment in training in Denmark and research in Finland. The fact that these ostensibly similar countries have pursued such divergent strategies cannot be explained using the established literature on employer organization, labor power resources, and small states. This article develops and resolves this puzzle by focusing on the interaction among organized actors. It argues that nineteenth-century economic and geopolitical challenges generated two distinctive and enduring collective responses based on industry-labor cooperation in Denmark and state-industry cooperation in Finland. Those coalitions continue to shape the twenty-first-century experimentation, supporting investment in continuing education in Denmark and technological innovation in Finland. In explaining these differences, this article not only identifies an enduring and constructive role for strategic cooperation but also explains how it varies among ostensibly similar coordinated economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to ascertain how real estate valuation service developed in Finland from the late 1980's till the end of 2007 and which factors contributed to this development. The discussion is based on literature review and in-depth interview study with 29 long-term professionals of the Finnish real estate field. This study suggests that the development of real estate valuation service in Finland can be divided into four periods in which valuation has been by its nature and business environment different. These periods include the economic boom of the late 1980's, the recession period, the recovery of the economy and the time of internationalisation. During these periods commercial real estate valuation service developed to professional business. This article discusses the development of real estate valuation service from the viewpoints of valuation business and players, authorized valuers' system, standards for valuation and financial reporting as well as some other development aspects of real estate valuation such as valuation document and methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to reveal the Finnish paper industry from the economic geographic perspectives. There have been many mill and machine line closures especially in Finland after 2001. Therefore, it is interesting to research the development of manufacturing and transportation costs and paper prices during 2001-2008 in a large case mill. The research tradition of economic geography concerning the paper industry is scanty in the Nordic countries, and not many discussions have been published. This paper attempts to narrow the gap between theoretical and empirical discussions concerning the paper industry. The empirical data is obtained from one large integrated mill, and the research data covers cost components from the years 2001-2008. The results show that the economic performance has lowered clearly in the case mill. An interesting finding was that in overseas distant deliveries, transit costs can even decrease due to inexpensive sea transportation and paper prices slightly increase, probably due to lowered competition in the exported paper qualities. Although the mill data has been examined in detail, it only covers one large paper mill with several machine lines. Therefore, the results can only be generalized to some extent to other export-dependent paper industries operating in peripheral areas with minimal local demand. Our study shows that the empiric methods of economic geography offer interesting views highlighting such spatial heterogeneities in the paper industry. The industry's location affects competition through transit costs, and this topic should be included more in location and economic studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although high inflation is associated with the spread of paper monies, rapid price increases are well known under the metallic standard from several countries, caused by the debasement of coins. The exact mechanism is still a puzzle. If agents were rational, why did they accept inferior coins at par with better ones? This paper compares five debasement cycles that occurred in Sweden-Finland 1350-1594. During the initial phase of such cycles coins tended to circulate by-tale, while by-weight circulation was most common towards the end of the cycles. A premium on the heavier coins implied that they were not driven out of circulation. The seignorage rate was significant during the initial phases of the cycles, while it decreased when prices and exchange rates adjusted in response to the debasement, prompting a recoinage, when the monetary unit was strengthened. It is this shift from by-tale to by-weight circulation that explains the high inflation rates that could occur before the rise of paper money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal income smoothing by households before the post-Second World War expansion in public welfare has gained attention in the history of poverty and social insurance. Little direct empirical evidence has been available. Finnish household budgets from 1928 with intra-year panel data on informal transactions enable analysis of the use of savings, loans and informal assistance to counter income variation by worker families in Helsinki. Income shares of transfers were small compared with labour-based methods of supplementing the earnings of the surveyed male breadwinner families. Within the year, however, the combined use of assistance, credit, and savings accounts compensated on average 36% of income fluctuations, while means such as added workers or taking in lodgers appeared ineffective on the short run. Informal assistance mattered for the poorest households, but provided inferior coverage compared with that attained through credit and savings by more affluent workers. Income inequality was therefore replicated as risk-management inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes long-term spatial developments in Finland by focusing on two predictions of the new economic geography (NEG) models: the increasing persistence of Iocational patterns and the rising dominance of growth centers. The empirical analysis is based on regional population data from 1880 to 2004. The results support the hypotheses. Evolutions in rank and rank-size distributions during the processes of industrialization and urbanization suggest increasing persistence of regional structures. The analysis of causal processes between population centers and their hinterlands shows that these regions grew hand-in-hand in the pre-war period, whereas agglomeration shadows started to come about during the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article employee-employer relations with respect to upper-white-collar employees in Finnish large-scale companies are investigated. The period is from the 1920s to the 1980s. The article shows that the employee-employer relations were during the whole period based on mutual trust. In spite of significant transformations in the labour market practices and in interest formulation and unionisation among these employees, it was in the interests of both parties to maintain these trustful relations. However, the tools with which to maintain such relations changed and adapted. The process was not easy, and was marked by elements of conflict and tension. The elements of trust had to be actively strengthened and rebuilt, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. But as the post-war economic and societal model was marked by a striving for consensus and the smoothing out of conflicts in order to promote industrialisation and growth, the institutional model also supported the maintaining of mutual trust and loyalty between the employees and the employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relevance of unemployment hysteresis in seventeen OECD countries. We employ an out-of-sample forecast exercise in which a mean-reverting autoregressive model is compared to an autoregressive model with an imposed unit root. A substantial difference in forecasting performance between the twomodels is established formany countries, but the results aremixed in their strength. The evidence for unemployment hysteresis in Austria, Finland, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan and Sweden is, however, convincing. For no country can unambiguous support for a mean reverting unemployment rate be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines when the information on central management paradigms first arrived in Finland, and how they have been discussed in Finnish journals. Our key findings reveal that rational paradigms - scientific management and structural analysis - dominated management discussions in Finnish journals until the 1980s, and that discussion on management paradigms in Finland in the twentieth century appears to have been characterised by a slow transition from rational ideology towards normative ideologies. We also found that Barley and Kunda's thesis (1992) regarding the alternation of rational and normative ideologies is not really applicable to Finland: it would seem that the emergence and adoption of paradigms coincide more with changes in economic and business structure and influences arriving from abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to analyse the possibilities of Finnish households saving and their consumption patterns in the beginning of the 1950s. As a tool for this analysis, the article estimates unbalanced sector accounts and private consumption for 1950s Finnish households. These accounts allow analysing the structure of the Finnish households' income and the structure of household consumption. As these accounts are estimated for the whole country and in addition for three different categories of municipalities, they allow an analysis of welfare differences between different regions. This article is not limited to the macro analysis. Based on the individual replies of the cost living studies, some households are analysed in more depth to get a broader view on their way of living. The analysis of individual household replies is also based on the sector accounts, i.e. accounts similar to those on the aggregated level are estimated for individual households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]