Economic Growth Rate May Be High in Spite of a Decreasing Working-age Population in Finland

This article examines the possibilities for the growth of real income in Finland in a situation where the population is aging at a record rate. In contrast to other European countries, no larger age groups were born in Finland after the 1940s. Therefore, the labor force will decrease in long run, even though an abundant amount of labor reserves still exist in Finland after the exceptionally deep economic depression experienced in the previous decade. Finlands real income has been calculated as the product of the labor input and productivity per hour worked. The rate of change in productivity has been estimated on the basis of the historical development of labor productivity. On the basis of an analysis of labor input and productivity per hour worked, the real income of Finland per capita could rise to one-and-a-half times what it is now in one decade and a half, even if the working-age population decreased markedly and even if the number of hours worked per employed person declined at the traditional rate. Increasing immigration is not the only solution to the challenges of an aging and diminishing working-age population. By employing domestic labor reserves and improving productivity, reasonable economic growth rate can be achieved and at the same time the problems caused by uncontrolled immigration can be avoided

Real income and population prospects in the Baltic Sea Area

The nine nations bordering on the Baltic Sea differ greatly in regard to both their population and their economic situation. Russia has one hundred times the population of Estonia and in Denmark the real income per capita is six times that of Latvia. When measured by real income per inhabitant, the poor Baltic countries are about half a century behind their rich neighbors, so that there is marked economic pressure to emigrate to these rich neighboring countries. In these poor transition economies the birth rate has plummeted during the last few years and the difference in life expectancy compared to the rich neighboring countries has increased. Even in a situation of rapid economic growth, it is not at all certain that the fertility rate will return to its earlier level

Educational expenditures in Finland up to the year 2030

In this paper expenditures on education and their share to the gross domestic product (GDP) in Finland are estimated until 2030. The estimate of the number of pupils is based on the 1991 population prognosis made by the Central Statistical Office of Finland. The actual education expenditures per pupil has been calculated for different levels of education in 1980-1990. In the future only real labor costs per pupil are assumed to increase. They will increase at the average rate of the labor productivity growth in the economy. Other real costs (teaching materials, welfare services, administrative costs, etc.) per pupil are assumed to be constant during the prognosis period. Although the school age population will clearly diminish, the real education expenditures will increase by one thirds up to 2030 in Finland. However, at the same time the share of these expenditures to the GDP will decrease by two percentage points. On the other hand social expenditures in proportion to the GDP will increase very rapidly due to the aging population. Yet the growth rate of the public expenditures is expected to be only sligthly higher than the growth rate of the GDP

Variable relativity of causation is good

Interventionism is a theory of causation with a pragmatic goal: to define causal concepts that are useful for reasoning about how things could, in principle, be purposely manipulated. In its original presentation, Woodward’s (2003) interventionist definition of causation is relativized to an analyzed variable set. In Woodward (2008), Woodward changes the definition of the most general interventionist notion of cause, contributing cause, so that it is no longer relativized to a variable set. This derelativization of interventionism has not gathered much attention, presumably because it is seen as an unproblematic way to save the intuition that causal relations are objective features of the world. This paper first argues that this move has problematic consequences. Derelativization entails two concepts of unmediated causal relation that are not coextensional, but which nonetheless do not entail different conclusions about manipulability relations within any given variable set. This is in conflict with the pragmatic orientation at the core of interventionism. The paper then considers various approaches for resolving this tension but finds them all wanting. It is concluded that interventionist causation should not be derelativized in the first place. Various considerations are offered rendering that conclusion acceptable.publishedVersio

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