{"id":16652,"date":"2012-08-27T09:09:03","date_gmt":"2012-08-27T14:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16652"},"modified":"2012-08-27T09:09:03","modified_gmt":"2012-08-27T14:09:03","slug":"finland-and-the-dangers-of-being-a-company-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/27\/finland-and-the-dangers-of-being-a-company-town\/","title":{"rendered":"Finland and the dangers of being a company town"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had no idea that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/node\/21560867?fsrc=scn\/tw\/te\/pe\/nokiaeffect\" target=\"_blank\">Finland&#8217;s economy<\/a> was so tightly tied to the fortunes of Nokia:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Nokia contributed a quarter of Finnish growth from 1998 to 2007, according to figures from the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA). Over the same period, the mobile-phone manufacturer\u2019s spending on research and development made up 30% of the country\u2019s total, and it generated nearly a fifth of Finland\u2019s exports. In the decade to 2007, Nokia was sometimes paying as much as 23% of all Finnish corporation tax. No wonder that a decline in its fortunes &mdash; Nokia\u2019s share price has fallen by 90% since 2007, thanks partly to Apple\u2019s ascent &mdash; has clouded Finland\u2019s outlook.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Strip these sorts of firms from the list and only one resembles Nokia: Taiwan\u2019s Hon Hai, an electronics manufacturer. Yet Nokia made 27% of Finnish patent applications last year; the corresponding figure for Hon Hai was 8%. Although numbers are falling, Finland is home to the greatest number of Nokia employees; Hon Hai\u2019s staff is mostly in China. It is a similar story with other firms. Sales of Nestl\u00e9, a consumer-goods company, weigh in at 15% of Swiss GDP but its share of Swiss jobs is punier than Nokia\u2019s in Finland. Samsung, whose revenues are twice Nokia\u2019s, has half its clout as a share of GDP: South Korea\u2019s economy is more diversified. The importance of Nokia to Finland looks like a one-off.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had no idea that Finland&#8217;s economy was so tightly tied to the fortunes of Nokia: Nokia contributed a quarter of Finnish growth from 1998 to 2007, according to figures from the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA). Over the same period, the mobile-phone manufacturer\u2019s spending on research and development made up 30% of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,25,62],"tags":[603,174,380,547,144,118],"class_list":["post-16652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-europe","tag-finland","tag-innovation","tag-patents","tag-smartphones","tag-taiwan","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4kA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16653,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16652\/revisions\/16653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}