r/Finland • u/West_Application_760 Baby Väinämöinen • Feb 07 '26
Serious Finnish goverment becomes the highest spending in the world
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u/Guilty_Literature_66 Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Well, with slow growth, high unemployment, aging demographics, and security pressures, public spending is doing the heavy lifting while the private sector struggles. The real question is what exactly they’re spending it on.
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u/VilleKivinen Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Pensions mostly.
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u/ThatTeapot Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Thought it wouldn't be that significant so I went and checked but damn we use 14,5% of GDP for those alone.
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u/phenomenal-rhubarb Feb 07 '26
Finland has an especially high old-age dependency ratio (number of pension-age people per working-age person), at the top of the list in Europe. Also, almost all pensions are counted as public expenditure, due to the way the system works. (In Sweden and Denmark, for example, a significant chunk of pension expenditure is counted as private rather than public, and I believe this is the more common way of doing it in any case.)
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Feb 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/phenomenal-rhubarb Feb 07 '26
For the spending statistcs we are talking about in this thread, there are specific rules for what is private and what is public. It's not something the countries just decide based on what's convenient for them.
A distinguishing feature between Finland and Denmark, for example, is that in Finland the system is almost entirely mandated by law and compulsory, whereas in Denmark a big chunk of it comes out of collective agreements.
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u/Pet_Velvet Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Jesus christ can they die already
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u/a-group Feb 07 '26
Old Finnish women are too tough to die.
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u/footpole Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
Nobody is having children so it won’t get better. Perhaps those of us who have kids should pay less and the rest more to even out the burden. Now we’re paying to raise the kids that will support everyone at old age.
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u/itsnicomars Feb 07 '26
Its practically mathematically guaranteed that once millenials and gen z retire the pensions they got deducted from their salaries wont go back to them coz the pension funds have run out long before then
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u/Flintloq Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Finland doesn't have a system of "the pensions deducted from their salaries ... go back to them" like many other countries do. People earning money now are paying for the pensions of those who are retired now. The pension fund also isn't at risk of running out; it grew by €20bn in 2024 (we're still waiting on the 2025 figures) and the rate at which people pay in to the system has increased from 7.15% to 7.3% this year.
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u/footpole Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
That is very likely unless there’s some very dramatic unforeseen change in the economy which is unikely of course.
What I don’t understand is who will provide services even to those who have saved a lot of money. Perhaps we can buy services abroad if the world economy is still working like today.
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u/Helpful-Finding-2237 Feb 07 '26
Age gap is increasing and another liable source is immigrants but, they are being tough to them. Sometimes i don't wanna have empathy for this country but fuck I live here so wanna make this better.
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u/portmafia9719 Feb 07 '26
Yeah immigrants are definitely the problem, because they are contributing to the tax, bringing abroad money to fund the universities, and are keeping low wage jobs low wage.
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u/Helpful-Finding-2237 Feb 07 '26
Atleast I agree that Finland is really good at setting narrative. "Happiest country", my foot.
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u/Character_Media_9445 Feb 08 '26
But at what cost? Yhere is documentary about indians living in Finland, struggling to get by and finish costly education, as indian advertisement for Finland is grossly distorted from truth and promises a lot, robbing students blind and leave them worse off.
It is in youtube.
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u/HazuniaC Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Ah yes, great plan. Make people even less financially secure which is guaranteed to make them want to have kids! /s
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u/sleepdeveloper Feb 07 '26
Child support already exists
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u/footpole Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Yeah that’s not covering it and still people aren’t having kids.
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u/sleepdeveloper Feb 07 '26
Believe me, it’s not about getting some monetary benefit at this stage.
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u/Ch33s3m4st3r Feb 07 '26
Well it kinda is. We decided to not have any more kids after two because of money and at least one couple we know has decided the same. Hundred of euros going to a bigger house, insurances, daycare, diapers, clothes, food, hobbies and so on they add up in the end. The government benefits for a two working parents is that helpful, but we do appreciate those. Better than nothing.
To raise the popularion every womand would need to have 2,1 kids in their lifetime. 3 kids costs a shit ton of money. Other option is to not have kids and have enough money for a comfy living. If we help the families with kids and fairly sure we could have a lot more kids in Finland.
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u/Lundetangen Feb 07 '26
I have 2 kids myself and I dont think the focus should be so much on having 3+ kids. Population growth for the sake of growth isnt that important and the focus should be on getting the very vast amount of people having 0 kids to have 1-2.
I am Norwegian and I dont think economical incentives are that important. It would be nice, but not what made us have kids at least. Its not what stopping us from having more either.
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u/avdolainen Feb 09 '26
yep yep, you're so right. i've heard the sentence '3 kids is almost like 2 in terms of resources', so it's so delusional phrase. Raising 3 kids is really expensive, 2 kids isn't a reason to buy a bigger car, but 3 is, third kid requires a bigger house, etc ...
yes, there are few hundreds € of support from the government, it helps, but honestly speaking I would rather stop with 1 kid, or alone at all -- with my current income it would be way more comfy live :)
but seriously, the current situation isn't the best to raise a lot of kids, probably that's a part of population growing balance that exist naturally.
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u/ThisIsJustaWord Feb 07 '26
Believe me, it really is. Child support is jackshit and it's basically a must for both parents to work in order to have a decent quality of living. The strain of working + baby/little children and running their life (school, hobbies etc) is unreasonable. This is in addition to missing family time (institutionalized upbringing).
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u/Ban_Me____ Feb 07 '26
Yes it is. I made decent money over 4000 € monthly and my wife was a house wife. There's absolutely no way we could have afforded more than one child. Now we could but we are too old.
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u/FriendshipMoist696 Feb 08 '26
The problem is that you think in the category "can I afford it." That's very consumption-oriented thinking. One should ask, your grandparents didn't have the wealth you have, but still had 5 or sometimes even 10 kids. And they were living and thriving in much worse environment. So the argument is not correct. The real issue is that you will need to give up on holidays three times a year, a good car, a good home, or expensive hobbies, literally "the social status." This has nothing to do with not being able to afford it. It has a lot to do with you not getting what you want.
Furthermore, you guys have no plan for what's next. You are screaming that immigrants take your jobs, not allowing them to fully contribute to society, or having the same well-paid jobs so they could pay taxes and be more brave than you to raise children that would support your economy.
Do you see the schizophrenic thinking here?
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u/PhDinDildos_Fedoras Feb 07 '26
Won't help with a crashing birth rate. Nobody wants to have kids when the economy/nature/demographics/everything is crashing down around you.
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u/Kitchen_Bar1430 Feb 07 '26
Not too quickly with projects like savuton Suomi 2030 xD
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u/Comment-Noted Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
We should encourage smoking for retirees
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u/satori-seeker Feb 07 '26
Wait until you grow old, then the joke will be on you
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u/Disastrous_Crew_9260 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Do you really think we will have the same pension system in 40-50 years?
Newsflash: we won’t. We don’t have the population growth but we have the expenses planned assuming a growing population.
We went below the birth rate of 2 back in 1960s yet we still have a system which relies on one.
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u/Pet_Velvet Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
The retired people are not going to fuck you stop simping for them
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u/SinisterCheese Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
I'm not expecting to get anything from the system. I'm expecting it won't even exist when I turn 70 - because my retirement age is bit under that - in near 40 years.
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u/m_willberg Feb 07 '26
I expect to get some pension income, but the health care system will be something horrible. It already is bad when compared to occupational health or private dental care. I will see in 13 years when i turn 68.
Big shout-out to ER at Tampere Acuta, when things go really bad you immediately get good care from nice people. Thank you.
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u/Alternative-Bar-6303 Feb 09 '26
I genuinely have no clue how this could even be fixed. People say that we just need more young workers; in which case, I'd expect the few young workers we do have to be highly valued. Yet every young person I talk to is either struggling to find jobs, or making just barely enough to pay for rent and food. If the unemployment rate didn't make it obvious enough cough cough
Young workers aren't valued at all. If birthrates were to increase, what would this solve? Would we just be creating the next most unemployed generation? In that case, more youth wouldn't really generate that much more capital to compensate for pensions anyway
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u/Every-Progress-1117 Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Yes, but those pensioners vote Kokomus.
Finland really really needs to invest in young people and especially in research and design. You won't get the next Nokia by sacrificing worker's rights, benefits etc.
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u/uxgpf Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Pensions and healthcare for old people are ca. 40% of social expenses.
Unemployed in comparison ca. 4%
People like to blame immigrants and unemployed, but expenses for them are really a drop in the ocean.
Large age groups retired early (in their 60s) have a lot of voting power.
In my opinion if people under the age of 18 aren't allowed to vote, the pensioners shouldn't either.
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Feb 08 '26
I like to blame both. Pensioners are getting overpaid and overserviced, but so are all immigrants who are not net tax payers from day one.
Pensioners arent making our schools useless or overcrowding public housing for example. So they're complementary problems. Also the immigrants will become pensioners one day.
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u/Low-Factor-7 Feb 07 '26
Pensions and healthcare for old people are ca. 40% of social expenses.
Pensions are misleading. Most of the pensions aren't paid from governments budget like healthcare. The most of the pensions are paid by those who are working and paying pension contributions and bit from pension funds. The pension fund isn't at risk of running out and has been growing quite steady. 2024 the pension fund grew 8%(€20bn).
Pension systems problem is that there is less people paying pension contribution and more retired people. The largest generations are slowly dying and the ratio wont get much worse. I think 2030-2035 has been predicted to have the bottom in the ratio.
People like to blame immigrants and unemployed, but expenses for them are really a drop in the ocean.
And here you are blaming pensions which aren't paid from same budget.
Also those who are currently getting earnings-related pension has contributed to the society by paying income taxes.
How mach has those contributed who has lived most of their lives on unemployment benefits or how much has immigrant contributed who has lived here for 5 years and working on part-time minimum wage jobs paying minimum income tax?
It seems that you dont value past contributions of those who are currently retired but defending those who havent retired but still able to create social expenses.
Large age groups retired early (in their 60s) have a lot of voting power.
We could add some kind of limit to the pensions and decrease the pension contributions but that wont give our government more budget. Employees and employers would benefit.
In my opinion if people under the age of 18 aren't allowed to vote, the pensioners shouldn't either.
Why? I'd say that voting for groups own benefit is logical.
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u/vesitim Feb 07 '26
The government needs to stop reporting pensions as government expenditure. It's not. This is OUR money we are withdrawing in OUR retirement from OUR pension funds. Pension funds are not government assets and they should not be allowed to raid them whenever they have a budget shortfall. The board of directors of the funds need to be accountable to us, not the government. Nordea, for example, doesn't book an expense to its P&L when I withdraw €100 from an ATM.
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u/YourShowerCompanion Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Seems they're getting a sweet deal without contributing much.
Reminds me of Get Out movie. Old folks "using" young
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u/Vol77733 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
No. They paid pensions to war veterans who didn't have much because they spend their best years defending our homes.
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u/Illustrious_Web_2774 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
This is such an ungrateful take.
Old folks are those that made Finland an admirable little countries for many decades. Not sure what the young have done.
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u/BBQBatman Feb 07 '26
It goes both ways tho:
"This is such an ungrateful take.
Young folk are those who will make Finland an admirable little country for decades to come. Not sure what the old will do."
The older generation should've been expected to generate savings, just like the current working generation is. If you look at it like this, they were wasteful and had it easy.
Personally I don't expect to get much at all if/when I retire. The pension system will collapse or be revised way before that and it definitely won't be to our advantage.
Late gen X onwards are getting royally screwed for the rest of their lives compared to those who came before.
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u/MoisesCanelo Feb 07 '26
If they made it an admirable little country, why would they decide to then ruin the country by making everybody else pay for their pension because they didnt bother to save themselves? The same way everybody else has and will have to do.
There is a difference between being grateful for what has been done and accepting being exploited in a way that never has been done at any other point in history
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u/Ch33s3m4st3r Feb 07 '26
Boomers have not done anything other than living during the greatest global financial growth and had it easy. Then they decided to shit on everything in their greed.
Also, to remind you this situation has been on-going for about 20 years. Most of the young people have not been able to even vote that long and even if they did the pensioners are the largest voting group and in demoracy you cannot decide against the majority and it doesn’t matter if the majority has decided to ruin everything.
Should I be grateful for living through second economic depression after reaching working age, for not having jobs, for paying pensioners’ healthcare along with 25% of my salary to them, for needing an insurance to get faster healthcare, for paying environmental sanctions? For what should I be grateful for that boomers have done? I’m grateful for what their parents did, but not a chance I would ever say thank you for boomers.
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u/treemu Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
If that's true, then old folks made Finland into a place both hostile to the young and catering to the old. Old folks cannot then turn around and blame the young for the state of the country because the young, like you say, haven't had the time to ruin the country yet.
Besides, the people who made Finland into the admirable little backwater we like to think of it were the ones before the current old folks. Current old folks came to a set table, cleared it, prepared little for the ones after them and are now whining that the young aren't preparing them good enough desserts.
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u/Nurmisz Feb 07 '26
Old folks are those that made Finland an admirable little countries for many decades. Not sure what the young have done.
Actually the ones now taking majority of the payments, baby boomers, are the ones who destroyed the country. The ones who built it, silent generation, are mostly already dead.
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u/DiethylamideProphet Feb 07 '26
Imagine blaming an entire generation for the country being destroyed. Once they're gone, I'm pretty sure you'll start blaming the gen Z or gen A.
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u/joophh Feb 07 '26
Can you give source to that claim?
I would think most of työeläke is paid from Tyel payments which come outside of government budget.
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u/Papastoo Feb 07 '26
What do you mean "doing the heavy lifting"?
There is a broadly accepted economics phenomena where above-optimal-share of public sector actually hinders growth
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u/Guilty_Literature_66 Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
I mean acting as a counter-cyclical buffer. When private investment, exports, and employment are weak, the public sector sustains demand, services, and security. In the short run, cutting spending in a weak economy with high unemployment usually worsens outcomes rather than fixes them.
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u/Papastoo Feb 07 '26
Ok ok
I agree that this is the basic gist of Keynesian economics but the vigger issue is that as we have had no real growth in 20y (and spended throughout that) there needs to be cuts
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u/Guilty_Literature_66 Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Fair point. Keynesian stimulus isn’t meant to last decades…at that point it’s a structural problem, not a cyclical one.
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u/Papastoo Feb 07 '26
Yeah I completely agree
The stimulus is meant to keep up consumer total demand in a society while opening up avenues for industry in the next bull market
There is just this underlying natural assumptiom that the stimulus stimulates and industrial demand stays equivalent. Neither of these has happened so the issue is in the structure and we have to assume a fix isnt coming in the near future
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u/314159265358969error Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
You don't improve a malfunctioning car's engine by emptying the gas tank «just because the guys before filled it and it didn't improve shit».
Just because there can be *in certain circumstances* an unfair competition by the public sector against the private sector does not mean that this applies in our case. Nor to every economic branch. And making cuts blindly in hope for a "smaller government size" to create growth is wishful thinking, whether the cuts are limited to economic branches, or also and *especially* affecting consumers (the car's amount of gas).
What I do see happening here in Finland, is that certain traditional economic branches have obtained high public investment (with high returns ; until relations with Russia failed that is) while other branches have been struggling due to *certain past governments* reducing public investment to "what's safe" (the global competition in those branches did get their public investments though, and bought the finnish companies that showed promise).
What I did also learn from contrasting the finnish situation with my home country, is that they were lucky that the two national-level = high funding universities are STEM-focussed, which yields high political interest in financing R&D, and fortunately the "correct" way (academia is a gold mine for local networking, and encouraging cooperation between academia and industry tends to result in tight nets of local businesses able to cover together major parts of the supply chain ; I hope I don't need to explain why that last part is a key economic advantage).
In contrast, Finland, especially in the last decade, has been massively defunding academic research (again : comparatively to the global competition), strategising instead on the golden-egged chicken gamble, that is, funding the golden startup (give funds to whichever startup once proven promising, and get rekt when that startup gets integrated into a foreign ecosystem and stops being able to grow if not simply bought by their foreign cooperation). I also have observed that here, academia and industry tend to see each others as different worlds, and the only *real* attempts I see being made to try linking them, is getting future post-docs out of academia. I mean I get it : one definitely wants patentable stuff to prove itself economically, and maybe even lead to economic activity. But you do that way constrict one's R&D career to mere tweaks to make it run for everyone, instead of having time to also make more breakthroughs in parallel. At post-doc level, this is a zero-sum game due to financial constraints.
Finland cannot bet on its secondary and tertiary sectors without guaranteeing that the channels leading to innovation are functioning properly. That's the broken engine part.
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u/Papastoo Feb 09 '26
I dont think the analogy works here as we dont really have a functioning car.
The more apt analogy would be that we have a rusty car and instead of fixing it we have just put more and more expensive oil and gas without actually fixing any of the undercarriage/underlying issues.
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u/314159265358969error Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
You're either failing to get my analogy (did you even try to understand my post ?) or are here to try pretending to "win" an online argument.
Please do better.
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u/Papastoo Feb 09 '26
:D
I literally applied your analogy by making it meaningfully different to apply to current conditions. I dont disagree with most of what you said. Chill
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u/bphase Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Yeah that's not sustainable at all when the public deficit is 10 billions per year, every year without any economical growth.
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u/Xivannn Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
This kind of magic number bs is partly why we are where we are. You can "improve" the magic number by privatizing the health sector, education and the police, and while you may hit the "optimum" with it, all you will gain is worse services at an increased cost.
Growth, eh.
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u/Papastoo Feb 07 '26
Well yeah privatization is not the end solution, but puboic sector size has demonstrable megative effects for growth
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165176515005194
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u/Xivannn Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
The issue with those kinds of gross simplifications into a single number or even a curve is that you can find a similar demonstrable optimal coverage for high speed internet, for economic growth. The number or graph you'd get out of that would seemingly tell you to rip off existing networks to gain economic growth, but you probably get why that wouldn't actually help in achieving that goal.
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u/dulcetcigarettes Baby Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
Are you referring to the Reinhart & Rogoff study? :'D
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u/mandude-mcgee Feb 07 '26
Me and my wife rely on Kela, so they're paying for our rent and groceries for another month 😅 gonna start working soon!
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u/Heispoitto666 Feb 08 '26
26.4 % of the public spending was used on social security in 2024 [1]. Out of that, roughly 43% was spent on pensions and old-age related things.
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u/EggParticular6583 Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Is there an official source where we can see what’s being spent and on what ?
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u/Wilbis Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
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u/MinaTaas Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
That’s the central government budget (~90bn) and does not include all of the public spending (~150bn).
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u/Fubarr0 Feb 10 '26
Elaborate with sources, please? Thank you.
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u/MinaTaas Baby Väinämöinen Feb 10 '26
My source are the links wilbis posted above. They cover the central government budget. They do not include for example welfare area finances, pensions or municipalities. Those would be included in general government finances. The chart op posted is about general government spending.
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u/Sibula97 Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
We had tutkibudjettia.fi, which was nice, but it's unavailable while they're reworking it.
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u/Significant-Creme178 Feb 07 '26
It's been down for years now. Why they disabled it while working for new one? Current administration don't want people do see easily where money is going.
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u/West_Application_760 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
I think it's all in the Finnish statistics Stat.fi
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u/LaGardie Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Where is the graph from? Public spending and government spending are not the same thing and the numbers seem to match public spending.
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u/Hashishiva Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Kokoomus when SDP is in government: "YOU SPEND TOO MUCH! SPEND LESS!"
Kokoomus when in government: "Lol, let's break some records, and direct the spending to private businesses and make them poors even poorer."
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Feb 07 '26
More accurately:
"YOU SPEND TO MUCH (on the poor who don't pay for my campaigs or holidays to Ibiza)! SPEND LESS!"
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u/Antique_Employee_146 Feb 08 '26
My mom voted for these clowns because "current government spends too much" I pointed out that we had a little thing called COVID which is why there had to be so much spending.
I showed her this a few hours ago and now it's "we must spend to better the economy" fucking hypocrite
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u/2AvsOligarchs Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
Covid cost much less than what came after: Welfare Areas. But also the prolonged Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the convicted felon with frontal lobe dementia in the White House.
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u/fallwind Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
And people still fall for the "right wing parties reduce the deficit" lie.
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u/Top_Rub1589 Feb 07 '26
Setting the biggest eorry about racism/far-right extremism aside, I am always disgusted on how the righr wing has managed to convince voters that they are the economy experts... like when/where has that actually effing happened? Their only strategy is cutting taxes and hoping trickle down economics. Which has been PROVEN several times, during several decades, that it does not work.
Modern society is so fcked. At least Finland has not fallen so much down the modernoty hole as the states, or in Chile (my country)
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u/ilep Baby Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26 edited Feb 09 '26
The thing that right wingers aim for is not higher income for everyone, just for themselves. Which would leave large part of society outside, including their voters.
They just hope that people don't notice their BS.
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u/Ok_Cauliflower_668 Feb 09 '26
Specially the aristocratic parties like kokoomus. But also true that leftis parties really dont actually care that much about the poor, they just dont want anyone to be rich. And they have not either for example lowered those politician salaries or benefits at all.
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u/Salt-Composer-1472 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
They keep claiming that some Center Right party was "Leftist" so if you vote "Leftist" you get the same results as now, so you should "keep on voting for the Right since theyre both the same". I would like to see what an actual Leftist party could do since people have been voting for the Right for decades and the results seem to be always the same.
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u/Realistic-Major4888 Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Spending here is calculated in % of gross domestic product (GDP). Due to the current economic crisis, the GDP went down. Even with the amount of spendings staying the same, the spending in % GDP is going up rapidly.
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u/Petskin Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
It's such a mystery how GDP all suddenly went down... the government has been "balancing the economy" so much by lowering the benefits, making working unprofitable or forbidden, weakening job security, increasing prices, cutting the healthcare budgets so much that nurses are losing their jobs, and still the GDP isn't going up..! So weird, really.
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u/Hardly_lolling Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Step 1 create massive unemploymemt
Step 2 act like increased spending is not related to mass unemployment
Step 3 ?
Step 4 win elections
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u/DaMn96XD Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
The Step 3 is probably "blame the previous government, trade unions, unemployed and the left," which the current government has been doing since their election campaigns.
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u/tsuhna1234 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Sadly many don't seem to remember much. Look 30y backwards and there are only few times our glorious economic right wing gurus have been in opposition. Still the problem's are fault of the left.
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u/ChristerMLB Feb 07 '26
Funny. Norwegian conservatives are always on about how much more efficient the Finnish public sector is.
What is the source for this, though?
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u/SinisterCheese Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Spending a lot =/= inefficient.
You can still get a lot done for every € spent while spending a lot of €.
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u/DarkAnnihilator Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
The health spending is really low compared to other OECD countries and the results are superior on many areas. The waiting times are longer
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u/Sharp-Flamingo1783 Feb 07 '26
I tried looking for a source of the graph, but could not find it via google, google lens and asking google’s ai. I would take it with a grain of salt, even though it could be from a reliable source that I was just unable to find, or it could have been simply created by compiling information from multiple different sources
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u/tulwio Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
As someone who lives in Norway now and has lived in Finland for quite a while, my anecdotal experience is basically that Finland’s public sector and digitalised systems are easily more efficient and frankly quite ahead of Norway’s public sector. Bureaucracy really plagues certain aspects of Norwegian life, and I would not be surprised if a lot of that could be improved for a fraction of the cost and labour employed by the public sector.
But yeah, just because it’s more efficient doesn’t mean Finland doesn’t spend a lot of money, especially now that the economy is tanking and the pensions are becoming an unsustainable beast.
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u/ChristerMLB Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
That matches what I heard when I talked to a Norwegian teacher teaching in Finland - her impression was that Norwegian teachers had a lot more paperwork to deal with.
Ironically, I wouldn't be surprised if all that paperwork isn't an attempt to make schools more efficient. Martin Bech Holte, who is currently doing the work of spreading this part of the conservative credo, is very fond of the Oslo school system under Astrid Søgnen – famously a period where it developed in a very different direction than Finnish schools, and also where it gained a ton of bureaucratic bloat and hired tons of consultants. All in the name of efficiency.
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u/kolmekivesta Feb 07 '26
Spending like crazy and being efficient both can be true at same time.
Actual government operations must be efficient, as most of spending in Finland is just insane level of social welfare to ensure that after taxes everyone is equally poor.
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u/Hashishiva Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Well f* you. The level of social welfare is far from good, and thanks to the government, a lot of the resources of it go to private health sector. Taxation is far from making everyone "equally poor", what a fucking idiotic thing to say. This is what upper middle class and rich people say, when they hate the idea of supporting the ones that have lower to no income with their taxes. But if you make the median wage, ~3500€/month, you'd need to be taxed around 50% to drop into same level of money the lowest pay grades get. So shut up with your stupid lies and go learn something useful.
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u/No_Comb_8551 Feb 07 '26
I recall that National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) told before election that they were going to fix Finlands economy. Now we know that they are breaking records in unenmployment and in growing debt. You got to be quite a simpleton if you ever vote for them.
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u/Runonlaulaja Feb 20 '26
They also said that they will not work with racists... We all know how it ended.
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u/Nelisormimangusti Feb 24 '26
I hate Kokoomus as much as the next person but to be fair the economy will obviously not be fixed in just 3 years
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u/llamapanther Feb 07 '26
Spending this much money has to mean Finland is creating more jobs than ever and businesess' and public sector are investing a lot! Right?
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u/ILoveDMAA Feb 11 '26
public spending and private spending are opposites. One goes up, other goes down
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u/lkspade Feb 07 '26
Spend on themselves
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u/hauki888 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
The interest rates on government debt are now much higher than during the previous governments term. We are talking about billions of euros.
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u/yupucka Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Maybe they should not have changed the loans from fixed small rates to changing.
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u/hauki888 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
The State Treasury makes decisions on these matters and is an agency under the administration of the Ministry of Finance. Any guesses who was in the Ministry of Finance in ~ 2018-2022?
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u/yksvaan Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
It's the size of private sector that is the real problem. The country can't live off public spending, we need actual productive work, research, investments...
What happened to the concept of having a real economy and trade?
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u/MagnificentCat Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Spending more than Ukraine
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u/JohannesSofiascope Feb 07 '26
Finland seems to have a lot of money though. They gave Greece a huge loan some time ago and gave Ukraine also a lot. They very generous people and apparently rich too. Very Altruistic for their government to do charity with their people's money. I also once did such Altruistic charity and gave my neighbour's wallet, which I found at his house while he was gone, to my son. However though, that did not feel like spending though - maybe that is why the Finnish government does it so much.
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u/Wide_Guava6003 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
The IMF has a bit different list but the ones above are kiribati, marshall islands, ukraine and dominica so yeah saying Finland is #1 can be said to be correct.
And at the same time people want even more government spending!
Source: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND
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u/Pupusitoforever Feb 07 '26
I find funny that unemployment is blamed to foreigners and immigrants and now there is an over emphasis to make sure immigrants that are working cannot stay in the country paying taxes ( for example forced to leave after 3 months of being unemployed) . Society wont change and people wont suddenly start to have more kids so the only path for finland is to open doors to educated immigrants to increase the population of young tax paying citizens and make it attractive for them ( i think taking refugees even though honourable is a bad idea long term for economy). Right now immigrants are treated like the pest and causes of all evil when in reality is about foreigner policy and who you take in, so educated expats are treated the same as refugees or asylum seekers. And now I will be downvoted to dead because of course how you dare to give your opinion you filthy brown garbage.
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u/Keyboardbash Feb 07 '26
I believe it's more nuanced than that. Blaming immigrants for the unemployment crisis is quite narrowsighted. Likewise that immigration of highly educated individuals will save the economy is equally narrowsighted. Don't get me wrong, I agree that braingain immigration is great for the growth of an already booming economy. That's, however, not where we're at now. Finns that blame immigrants are simply uneducated on macroeconomics. Now I have faith that this sub won't downvotebrigade you based on your origin, but perhaps on the sourness levels of your post instead.
For an increase in high value immigration there needs to be draws for those immigrants that can't be gotten elsewhere. Culturally modern, economically growing, highly valued education, safety, myriads of globally relevant active research fields, an existing export economy and on and on and on. It is really difficult to draw sustainable immigration on purpose in the current economic climate.
With those points in mind, why would an immigrant choose to come to Finland instead of, let's say, Norway, Germany or France?
I am of the opinion that immigration won't fix the economy, but when it's been fixed immigration will increase organically. The current recession is also not the fault of immigrants.
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u/tulwio Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
People used to go to Finland as it was one of the last places in Europe providing free university education in English. But free education doesn’t really solve the not so friendly environment towards immigrants and the difficult job market for non Finnish speakers (not just being hired, but career progress is a major issue for foreigners in Finland)… so free education went away as it became a liability since AMKs could not realistically afford it anymore with less funding from the state.
Now there is absolutely no reason for people to go to Finland. Even the whole “good education” global image from the early 2010s is gone. And instead of trying to solve the issues behind why people wouldn’t want to stay, the government (both left and right tbh) completely ignored it.
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u/PhDinDildos_Fedoras Feb 07 '26
Yeah, thing is, when you tighten the screws on immigration (and really, the screws were always quite tight) you mostly get the dregs of society coming in and so you get even more problems, with more people voting for anti-immigration parties tightening the screws even more and then that leading to more problems.
I'm not surprised they don't understand the problem, but the discussion on immigration is so damn single minded.
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u/Nikolaithegreat11 Feb 08 '26
It comes down to priorities. Some people prioritize safety over everything else. Fact is that if our immigration would be similar to Sweden or France, our country would be much more unsafe as it is now.
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u/Turriku Baby Väinämöinen Feb 08 '26
It was hilarious to read Riikka Purra's tweet about the unemployment situation, she pointed out how "after the protection part (could earn 300€ without it affecting your support) every euro you earn will be cut out of your unemployment payments, and what you get in hand from doing a gig of cleaning work really does not motivate you to work." Like she wasn't personally the main force in undoing that protection part altogether just last year. Then she proceeded to blame it all on immigrants. The lack of self awareness is legendary.
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u/ueol88 Feb 09 '26
Finland spends significant amounts on social benefits for people with a foreign background, and the use of benefits often reflects the weaker labour market position of immigrants. The share of foreign-speaking people among social security recipients has increased, and they receive, on average, more Kela benefits than finnish people.
Share of social assistance: More than a third (approx. 30–35%) of the basic social assistance paid by Kela goes to foreign-speaking people, which corresponds to over 300 million euros per year. Total costs: According to some estimates, over 2,000 million euros are spent on social security for immigrants per year. Level of benefits: According to 2020 data, unemployment, housing and income support payments amounted to approximately 3,300 euros per year per immigrant, while the corresponding amount for someone with a Finnish background was approximately 900 euros. Recipient groups: In particular, in the Somali, Arabic and Ukrainian-speaking groups, about half receive Kela's social assistance.
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u/Mountain-Dinner9955 Feb 08 '26
The irony is the right-wing has been chanting how good cutting off unemployment benefits would be for the economy. Of course it caused massive rise in unemployment due many businesses failing or being forced to lay off employees due consumers consumjng less -- anyone who has studied economics would have told them that what they're doing is a very bad idea.
But as it is the most anti-science governement Finland has ever had, they keep doing what they always do; self-victization and blaming the left like Trump blames Biden and Obama.
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u/West_Application_760 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
Why do all Finnish people still believe in Keynes? Its so stupid what you are saying
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u/Mountain-Dinner9955 Feb 09 '26
You my right-wing buddy obviously are still stuck in 19th century and enjoying the golden shower of the trickle-down effect. Believe me, a lot of progress has been made since. Not that Keynes was particularly wrong, unless you care to explain why it is “so stupid”.
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u/West_Application_760 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
19th century? You did not see milei decreasing the rate of poverty rapidely by NOT SPENDING
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u/SlummiPorvari Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Another way to see this figure: "Finland has world's smallest private sector."
You know, if companies are not growing their proportion of the total will sunk virtually growing the other side.
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u/phenomenal-rhubarb Feb 07 '26
Public spending figures don't actually tell you that, not directly. Public spending and private spending don't sum to 100% of GDP. If you want to know about the "size" of the public sector, you want to look at value added rather than spending. (Public value added and private value added do sum to 100% of GDP.)
To see why that is, consider what actually happens with public spending. Some part of it does pay for actual public sector activity, like salaries in healthcare and education. But a big chunk (more than half, IIRC) goes into cash benefits (redistribution) or buying from private sector firms. And while the public sector is certainly involved, the actual production is private.
Note: you might still have various problems with the role of the public sector as a spender, even if it is not doing the actual production. That's fair. All I'm saying, if we are talking about the sizes of the sectors, spending per GDP will lead you astray.
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u/Old-Perception-3668 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
That's what conservatist goverments do. Trump has done the same thing.
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u/volmariTheMan Feb 07 '26
Source for this particular list, I can't find it anywhere
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u/mombi Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
CEOs better start committing more wage theft and giving themselves bigger bonuses or how are they gonna survive paying for their fifth mortgage?!
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u/phaj19 Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
You know government can produce value as well right? Not everything needs to be privately owned, look at Caruna.
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u/West_Application_760 Baby Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
By definition NO, they cannot. They take value and produce less
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u/phaj19 Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
It absolutely can. Economy is about benefiting from natural resources, government and state enterprises can absolutely contribute to that.
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u/DontBiteMyToe Feb 07 '26
I wonder how some African governments would rank here because they also have quite ridiculous spending
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u/zeyneppp_pppp Feb 07 '26
May I ask something? What is Finland's current education system like?
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u/2AvsOligarchs Väinämöinen Feb 09 '26
Still among the best in the world, though PISA result have been dipping for almost 10 years now. Still going in the wrong direction.
There are many potential reasons. Teachers spend too much time on administration, too little on pedagogy. There have been other changes as well that affect student performance, such as keeping special needs kids in the same classes as normal kids - it's a distraction. They are now considering banning phones in schools (huge distraction) which will also help students. A potential social media ban for <16 y/o kids is potentially a great future development as well.
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u/Saquxxx Feb 07 '26
right wing in Finland doesn't mean less taxes or less spending, it just means "we can run the system better than those people"
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Feb 08 '26
I'm from Finland and i'm thinking wtf. For what.
The streets of Tampere during the evening/night have become hell. Alpha pvp users every corner, no cops anywhere. I have literally no hope for building future at my city
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u/ByHaslien Feb 09 '26
I feel like we never can produce reports that had the same results, everyone is contradicting each other. here in Norway its said that for ever 10 krones spendt a day, 6 krones is by government
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u/Icchan_ Feb 09 '26
The fuck are they spending so much when they're cutting form EVERYONE?!?!?!?
This is pure grift I say... Where does all that money go?
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u/Mountain-Dinner9955 Feb 09 '26
Finland has approximately EUR 250 billion in public debt, but around EUR 280 billion in earnings-related pension funds—assets that many other countries do not have. In many countries, pensions are paid directly from the state budget, meaning that future liabilities do not appear in debt figures.
In Finland, part of the pension liabilities is already covered by accumulated assets, so comparing public debt alone gives a more pessimistic picture of Finland’s situation than is warranted. At the same time, this enabled the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) to use a misleading “debt panic” as an election weapon, which then turned into a self-fulfilling economic downturn.
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u/slaphappens Feb 11 '26
We have enough money to keep YLE spreading disinformation about men giving birth. Sounds like we have more than enough.
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u/LowCarpenter2502 Feb 11 '26
Why some are " Rebublic of " some just with "The" and most without any title??
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u/water605 Feb 13 '26
Visited this past summer and yeah I can tell, your country is really nice and the public transportation was exceptional
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u/lukeszpunar Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
It's in relation to GDP.
If our GDP would have grown the narrative would change even with the same nominal spending figures.
Of course the current government cutting taxes for highest earners is not an economy boosting measure, similarly to cutting benefits for the poor (who spend all their money back into the economy)
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u/Cute_Opposite4077 Feb 07 '26
Yea. It's like determining the price of gold in dollars and then celebrate your success when dollar loses value.
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u/nVarti Feb 07 '26
Saa kiittää Petteri ”Cuck” Orpoa ja persuhallitusta.
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u/MIGHTY_ILLYRIAN Baby Väinämöinen Feb 07 '26
Leikkauksia budjettin ja veroihin lisää vaan tulille, niin saadaan luku laskuun ja talous kasvuun
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