FINANCE
Finland - Triple A for Business
Standard & Poor’s Rating Services recently affirmed its AAA long-term sovereign debt rating for Finland. According to S&P, Finland’s competitive economy and the government's prudent macroeconomic policy support fiscal stability and high levels of prosperity. Although affected by the global financial crisis, “Finland has seen a clear return to economic growth, boosted by recovering export markets”. According to OECD projections, Finnish exports are expected to grow by 9% in 2011 and 4.6% in 2012.
The assessments of S&P and the OECD are only one reason for doing business in Finland. The fundamental strength of the Finnish economy is accompanied by an extremely business-friendly environment while with its intensely global focus, it is committed to competitiveness.
Internationally, the country ranks high in terms of physical and communications infrastructure, the quality of its workforce, minimalistic bureaucracy, high standards of transparency and other measures of competitiveness.
Government incentive programs promote international investment as well as integration between academia and the business sector.
Trumping all these, however, is the simple fact that Finland is driven by innovation. It ranks among the top countries globally in terms of per capita R&D spending and leads Europe in the number of utility patents. New product development and commercialization has become a national pastime in Finland. The domestic market is filled with habitual early adopters, making the country a prime venue for testing the penetration of new business-to-business and consumer-oriented products and services.
These elements have come to create several thriving high-tech clusters in Finland. While most renowned for its expertise in wireless and mobile communalisations, Finland has also developed internationally competitive life science, cleantech and new materials and processes markets. It has also infused technological excellence into some of its traditional industries and has joined the ranks of global leadership in the paper industry, cruise ship building, elevators and other people-movers and locks and access systems.
Finland is a gateway country with strong logistic links and services to its Scandinavian neighbours, Russia, the Baltic States and the rest of northern and central Europe.
