Abstract
The Finnish home ownership sector, proportionately one of the largest in Europe, experienced a boom in the late 1980s, followed by a slump characterized by falling and static prices, arrears, and reduced transactions. The paper addresses the question of whether this can be regarded as a cyclical downturn, from which the market will eventually return to normality, or as a signal of structural change. The slump is largely due to the restructuring of the labour market that has come to erode the basis of the growth of home ownership. The paper examines the Finnish situation against that in Britain which has undergone similar market trends. It concludes that although there have been similar developments in both countries in moves towards low-inflation economies and reductions in subsidies to home owners-both of which could be interpreted as structural changes-their labour market developments show some differences. In Finland the development of a flexible and casualized labour market has been less vigorous. The paper concludes with a discussion of these developments in terms of crisis embedded in the attempts of governments to protect capital accumulation. It also speculates about the generalizability of the findings to other European countries.
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Doling, J., Ruonavaara, H. Home ownership undermined?. Neth J of Housing and the Built Environment 11, 31–46 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02496476
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02496476