HS Home 11.11.2003 - Seven myths about Finland

By Teemu Luukka and Anu Nousiainen

Last week, the Swiss organisation World Economic Forum published a study that showed once again that Finland is the world's most competitive nation. During the same week, Finland shared the #1 spot in a study that assessed the freedom of the media.

These top ratings of Finland are based on various statistics whose conclusiveness has been pondered by dozens, if not hundreds of researchers. The figures have been gathered from numerous countries that all have at least slightly different ways of calculating the data. Even the statistics of EU member states are not always exactly commensurate.

Nevertheless, a method for comparing nations that would be clearer than statistics has not yet been discovered.

The British magazine The Economist has a large unit that specialises in gathering statistical and research data. It produces an annual publication, World in Figures. This book gathers the whole world between its covers.

Finland rises to the No.1 spot many times in this publication as well. But the book also contains numerous disconcerting items that a self-confident Finn will not easily believe to be true.

Here are seven common claims that Finns often make about Finland, but that World in Figures shows to be exaggerated, if not entirely mythical:

1. Finland is safe, and Finns live long.

Not true! In a comparison of life expectancy of citizens of different countries, Finland places only 30th. The residents of Hong Kong, Spain, and Iceland, among others, live longer lives on average.

This is no surprise. Finland is the only Western nation listed among those countries where the likelihood of dying in war or otherwise violently is very high.

For every 100,000 inhabitants in Finland, more than twenty people die violently each year. This figure is more or less equal to that of Cuba and Venezuela. In Europe, only the Baltic states, Albania, Slovenia, and Hungary are more violent.

These figures include suicides. Our own statistics reveal that suicides account for the majority of violent deaths in Finland.

The suicide rate among Finnish men is higher than in any other Western European nation. Last year, 824 Finnish men killed themselves - this figure is smaller than during the previous several years, however.

Young Finnish males die as victims of suicide, assault, or an accident much more often than members of their age group in Western Europe.

Alcohol can often be found behind Finnish suicides and killings. But booze takes its toll on its own as well: for a few years now, alcohol has killed more working-age men in Finland than suicide.

Heart attacks that lead to death continue to be more common in Finland than anywhere else (138 deaths per 100,000 people annually).

And that is not all:

It is feared that the mortality from cardiovascular diseases will begin to rise once again. Last year, one in five deaths of working-age Finnish men were a result of cardiovascular diseases; for men over the age of seventy, cardiovascular ailments account for one in three deaths.

Obesity is increasing. Over half of Finnish men are overweight. It has been estimated that the number of diabetes patients will double within the next 10-15 years. More and more women smoke, and Finnish teenagers begin the habit at a young age.

And alcohol consumption just keeps on growing.

2. Spending on health care is high in Finland.

Nonsense. Finland does not rank among the thirty countries that invest the most in health care relative to their gross domestic products. Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Slovenia are all among the nations that beat us with this criterion.

Finland's health care expenditure accounted for less than seven percent of GDP in 2000, and this share has not grown for the past decade, not even during the economic boom. No wonder that the paychecks of Finnish nurses are so much smaller than abroad.

Finns also pay for a large chunk of health care expenses themselves. Payments from customers cover twenty percent of the costs, one of the highest shares among industrialised nations.

This means that instead of the rich and healthy, the Finnish health care system is increasingly paid for by the poor and sick.

A new comparison of OECD countries reveals that the Finnish health care system does not even treat citizens equally. People with high incomes visit doctors much more often than poorer Finns relative to the actual need for treatment. The inequality of the rich and poor began to manifest itself already in the 1980s. The use of health care services is distributed more unequally only in the United States and Portugal.

Nevertheless, Finns are on average much more satisfied with the health care services they receive than citizens of other EU member states!

Finland has achieved some excellent results even with scant resources. Infant mortality is extremely low, and cancer treatment results are top-notch in a European comparison.

3. The Finnish economy is the most efficient in the world.

The development of the Finnish economy has been the fastest in Europe since the Second World War, but we are still far from being the most efficient economy in the world, not to mention the richest country. Before the war, Finland was basically a developing nation when compared with other European countries and the U.S., so our per capita output is even now only the 16th highest in the world.

The long growth trend stopped abruptly during the recession of the early 1990s, which hit Finland harder than any other developed nation. During the recession, corporations cut their staff and streamlined production processes so effectively that in the late 1990s, the Finnish economy grew at an impressive rate.

A sign of inefficiency is the fact that a large portion of the workforce is unable to find a job. A smaller number of Finns than before has benefited from the rapidly growing GDP in the late 1990s.

A large part of our post-war output has been invested with the future in mind, in machinery and in education, among others. If these investments provide better returns in the future, economic growth may some day help increase the income of Finns better than at present.

After all, our praised competitiveness has not yet been reflected in the wallets of Finns: our purchasing power ranks only 23rd in the world. A Finn can purchase 30 percent less with his or her euros in Finland than an American can buy with dollars in the U.S.

4. The Finnish state has so much debt that it is incapable of doing anything.

Wrong! Despite the widespread local misconception to the contrary, Finland is one of the least indebted countries in Europe and in the entire world.

The Finnish state budget has displayed a larger surplus than any other European nation for several years now. The entire economy also shows a large surplus, which means that Finland lends more to other countries than it borrows itself.

Our current account surplus - or the surplus of goods and service exports - is the fourteenth largest in the world, measured in absolute, not relative terms. Finnish private citizens also have the smallest debt loads when compared to their European cousins.

5. Finnish labour is expensive.

No, it is not. The wages and other employer expenses paid for Finnish industrial workers are on an average EU-wide level; granted that in some sectors, the total labour costs are somewhat higher than the average.

However, the wages of highly educated individuals are much lower than in the United States or in many other European countries. For example, Finnish teachers, engineers, and researchers face one of the lowest income levels in Europe in their fields, and they are the very professionals that developed societies crave.

6. Finland has the highest relative number of mobile phones and computers.

Some time ago, Finland could boast about its Internet connections and mobile phone density, but no more. According to the statistics of The Economist, there are nine countries in the world with more mobile phones.

In reality, Finland probably places a few positions higher, because the statistics are based on the number of sold subscriptions, and it is more common in other countries to purchase several short-term subscriptions for the same handset.

Finns excel at taking advantage of new technologies and information, but we are nowadays far from the top spot in personal computer use: there are 42 PCs for every one hundred people in Finland, but there are 62 computers for every 100 Americans.

The number of computers per capita is higher than in Finland in ten countries. Time to update the "wired wonderland" myth?

7. Finland's development cooperation spending has fallen to practically nothing. Asylum-seekers are flooding into Finland.

Two old chestnuts, both nearly mythical. Although Finland's development cooperation spending fell to 0.32 percent of GDP for a while, Finland places tenth on the list of countries that helped developing nations by the relatively largest amount. Even some industrial nations invest relatively much less in development cooperation: Austria, Germany, Australia, and Japan for example.

The government has announced that Finland will aim to raise its development cooperation spending to 0.7 percent of GDP by 2010, taking into account the overall economic climate. In the UN, Finland has made a commitment to the 0.7 percent level.

If the amount of development aid is measured in euros, Finland's position falls to 18th. But is that such a bad result for a country with five million inhabitants?

Finland incurs very little expenses from asylum-seekers. When comparing which nations receive the most asylum-seekers, Finland is not to be found among the twenty most popular destinations.

Sweden received 14 times more asylum applicants than Finland in 2000. Even last year, Sweden's figure was ten times higher than Finland's. Even countries such as Hungary and Slovakia received clearly more asylum-seekers than Finland in 2000.

So much for the flood of refugees. Only a few people make it this far.

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 9.11.2003