Finland: Selected Issues

International Monetary Fund

No 2014/140, IMF Staff Country Reports from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: This Selected Issues paper on Finland discusses that the country is struggling to recover from the Great Recession, indicating that deeper, structural issues may be holding back growth. Estimates of potential output for Finland are an important part of the toolkit for policymakers—but they come with a degree of uncertainty. As this paper illustrates, the use of different methodologies and assumptions can lead to different results. However, there are indications that Finnish potential output growth is low at this juncture. From 1997 to 2007, potential growth, independent of the choice of smoothing, averages 3.2 percent per year. In 2013, that average has dropped to 0.2 with several of the models producing negative growth. This result indicates that the lack of a recovery in Finland is largely structural in nature. Therefore, any indication that the output gap is closing is due to falling potential rather than a pickup in growth. This leads to the advantages of structural reforms aiming to enhance Finland’s long-term capacity. Total factor productivity enhancing measures could be crucial in helping the economy recover despite the time it takes to implement them.

Keywords: ISCR; CR; firm; fund staff calculation; HP filter; filter approach; firm Size; output gap estimate; Structural reforms; Fiscal consolidation; Total factor productivity; Potential output; Fiscal stance; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60
Date: 2014-05-28
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=41585 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfscr:2014/140

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Staff Country Reports from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().