Saturday, March 28, 2015

Is Finland's Economy Suffering From Secular Stagnation?

Finland's economy has been attracting a lot of interest of late. And not for the right reasons, unfortunately. The economy in a country previously renowned for being highly placed in the World Bank's "Ease of Doing Business Index" has just contracted for the third consecutive year. Once famous for being a symbol of "ultra competitiveness" (it came number 4 in the latest edition of the WEF Global Competitiveness Index) the country is now fast becoming the flagship example of another, less commendable, phenomenon: secular stagnation.The origins of the theory of secular stagnation go back to the US economist Alvin Hansen (see here) who first used the expression in the 1930s. The hallmark of secular stagnation, he said, was a series of sick "recoveries which die in their infancy and depressions which feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment." This seems to fit the Finish case to a T.
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