 Seize the Moment: Financial Crisis and the Making of the Finnish Competition StateAnu Kantola and Johannes Kananen New Political Economy, 2013, vol. 18, issue 6, 811-826 Abstract: In this paper we examine how Finnish Governments dismantled the Nordic welfare state paradigm from the 1990s onwards and adopted Schumpeterian ideas of a competitive workfare state. In the early 1990s, Finland went through a financial crisis that was the most severe in OECD countries since the Second World War and came to play a major role in the paradigm change. In the crisis, the Ministry of Finance gained a central role as a consensus-building power broker, and formulated a political strategy of national competitiveness, which was adopted as a rationale of power for consensual governments and has been maintained since. We suggest that financial crises can become formative moments in which new ideas are adopted and policies are reformulated. They can also become moments which provide opportunity to overcome citizen opinion. In Finland, the wide popular and party support for the Nordic welfare model was not reflected in the new paradigm. Date: 2013 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:18:y:2013:i:6:p:811-826 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2012.753044 Access Statistics for this article New Political Economy is currently edited by Professor Colin Hay More articles in New Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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