Ask HN: Would You Relocate to Finland?

I have secured a nice permanent tech job in the Finnish public sector. I like the country, but I have heard some concerning comments about the Finnish economy in a few HN threads.

Any Finns or foreigners living in Finland that are willing to share their opinion? I know it's hard to predict, but do you think the current economic difficulties are structural or just a temporary consequence of war?

Are you concerned by the geopolitical situation, with an aggressive neighbor possibly escalating sometime in the mid term?

A Finn who has lived elsewhere for >10 years here.

The economic issues are both structural and a consequence of a number of crises. Baby boomers didn't have enough kids, and it was already obvious decades ago that there would be economic trouble after they retire. The large-scale immigration everyone saw as the answer is now happening. A lot depends on how well the immigrants integrate into the society.

While Finland used to be known as a highly educated country, other developed countries went past it. Millennials and younger never reached the educational attainment of generation X. As a consequence, Finnish workforce is not as productive as it could be.

Finnish economy relies too much on manufacturing and too little on services, making it less competitive than, for example, Sweden. That became an issue after the windfall from Nokia disappeared.

Saint Petersburg is the only major city in the world from which Finland does not look like a peripheral area. When the relations with Russia are bad, the economy suffers. Putin has been gradually going from bad to worse for 20+ years, and there are no changes in sight.

Putin is a known quantity, and I'm not too worried of what he will do next after Ukraine. What happens after he dies is another story, especially if there is no clear successor. The Soviet coup attempt of 1991 was scarier than anything Putin has done, and what happens after Putin could be worse.

Nope

Well Sweden and Finland's GDP per capita are currently within only a few thousand dollars of one another, with Sweden slightly taking the lead. I found that out just now, actually, and find it mildly surprising, I thought Sweden was further ahead. So I would first claim that as grounds to say Sweden is mostly suffering under the same yoke. They would probably become a richer nation faster by cutting back on the taxes, same as Finland. In fact the fact that the GDPs are so unexpectedly close makes me more convinced their mostly similar taxation structures are to blame, not less.

That being said: You are right, it's interesting that the combined worth of all Swedish startups appears to be very roughly 2-3x that of the combined population-scaled worth of all Finnish startups. What's the deal?

A Gini coefficient comparison shows a mild but not overwhelming difference. Sweden's currently hovers around 0.30, while Finland is at 0.285. (The US Gini coefficient is a whopping 0.48 or so for scale.)

I guess the only thing I could point to as a casual mechanism is that Sweden did in fact start quietly neoliberalizing out of some of its more distortionary taxes in the 1980s, in a way Finland hasn't seemed to yet. Sweden has abolished both its inheritance taxes and its gift taxes, for example, whereas Finland retains both (details vary a lot but you can ballpark 10-15% for both of them for ordinary folks). Maybe that has a disproportionate effect on the kinds of people who want to try their luck getting uber wealthy, so they can pass something down to their kids? I don't know, seems like it doesn't explain enough of the gulf. Maybe you can explain the $4k or so of extra GDP per capita through a confirmation of higher Gini, less tax distortion in certain areas, and being closer to the continental mainland. But that's a small enough difference that you could also feasibly call it due to the random walk of history. Both of these things are mysterious to me.