Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

Article Title

Finland's Economic Freeze

Authors

Shivang Mehta, Pomona CollegeFollow

Abstract

Abstract

The Eurozone sovereign debt crisis has been well documented and so has Germany’s booming manufacturing economy but these events are relatively easy to explain. Greece’s troubles can easily be traced to its social security structure and lack of land registry while Germany’s success is a result of labour reforms, an undervalued currency and an emphasis on small scale businesses which form the backbone of the economy. A relatively paradoxical case has been that of Finland; ranked second for global innovation by the World Economic Forum and with over $1.8 billion being invested by the government in the country’s tech market, Finland’s lack of success presents a unique case. The European Union’s only Nordic member has suffered a stark decline of 0.6 pc in the 3^rd quarter GDP growth of 2015, a figure worse than that of Greece. The implications of Finland’s lack of performance are clear cut, it is now the deadweight whose burden the EU must bear; the question lies in whether the government based in Helsinki can revive its once booming economy and at what cost. Current predictions don’t paint a rosy picture with the Finnish economy destined to be one of the worst performing economies, only second to Greece. This paper seeks to analyse the rise and fall of Finland from the perspective of Nokia, the steadily declining tech giant, and the internal changes that have occurred in the consumption patterns. The paper also uses the decline of the Russian economy as a quantitative reason for a lack of capital in the country and seeks to perform a cost benefit analysis of Finland’s participation in the single currency market as one of the obstacles to its path to recovery. The only way to thaw Finland’s frozen economy involves a series of austerity measures and structural reforms that will, at the very least, test the strength of the Eurozone’s economy.

DOI

10.5642/urceu.201601.05

Rights Information

©2016 Shivang Mehta

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Mehta, Shivang (2016) "Finland's Economic Freeze," Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union: Vol. 2016, Article 5. DOI: 10.5642/urceu.201601.05
Available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/urceu/vol2016/iss1/5