Pensions and Pension Funds in the Making of a Nation-State and a National Economy: The Case of Finland

Abstract

Finland has traditionally been highly agrarian and poor, a nation at the ultimate northern edge of the world. The country, situated around the Arctic Circle, did not offer particularly lucrative opportunities for making an easy livelihood. Farmers, who until the 1960s formed the biggest socioeconomic group, had to fight a constant battle against nature. During the short and rather cool summers, they had to try to gather stores to be used during the long and cold winters. Older Finnish literature tells many tales of frost that destroyed seeds and caused hunger, suffering and premature death. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Finnish gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was among the lowest in Europe; at times it was less than half of that of the United Kingdom and the United States (Maddison 1982). ‘Poor is the country, and poor it will be if you look for gold!’ stated the writer of the national anthem, which was first presented in 1848. The situation was not helped by the brutal civil war that broke out in 1918 (Alapuro 1988) or the wounds caused by the Second World War (Jussila et al. 1999; Pesonen and Riihinen 2002).

This chapter is an abridged version of Programme Paper No. 25, previously published with the same title under the UNRISD Programme on Social Policy and Development, March 2006.