Around 5.3 million people reside in Finland, with the majority concentrated in the southern part of the country. It is the eighth largest country in Europe in terms of area and the most sparsely populated country in these European Union. The native language of nearly all of the population is Finnish, which is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family and most closely related to Estonian. The language is one of only four official EU languages not of Indo-European origin. The second official language of Finland, Swedish, is the mother tongue of 5.5 percent of the population. Finland is a democratic, parliamentary republic with a mostly Helsinki-based central government and local governments in 348 municipalities. A total of about one million residents live in the Greater Helsinki area (which includes Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen, and Vantaa), and a third of the country's GDP is produced there. Other major cities include Tampere, Turku, Oulu, Jyväskylä, Kuopio, and Lahti.
Finland was historically a part of Sweden and from 1809 an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire. Finland's declaration of independence from Russia in 1917 was followed by a civil war, wars against the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and a period of official neutrality during the Cold War. Finland joined the United Nations in 1955, the OECD in 1969, the European Union in 1995, and the eurozone since its beginning. Finland has been ranked the second most stable country in the world, in a survey based on social, economic, political, and military indicators.
Finland was a relative latecomer to industrialization, remaining a largely agrarian country until the 1950s. Thereafter, economic development was rapid, and the country reached the world's top income levels in the 1970s. Between 1970 and 1990, Finland built an extensive welfare state. In the aftermath of the country's severe depression in the early 1990s, successive governments have reformed the Finnish economic system through some privatisation, deregulation, and tax cuts. |
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Finland - Mobile Market - Overview, Statistics & Forecasts
Finland has one of most innovative mobile markets in Europe. The country was a pioneer in developing 3G, and was the first to deploy 3G over 900 MHz spectrum. Growth in the sector continues to be strong despite high mobile penetration. The 3G now makes up a quarter of the total subscriber base, while mobile broadband has also grown considerably during the last two years. In addition, the country in 2009 boasted the lowest mobile call charges of all EU Member States. This report provides statistics and research on the Finnish mobile market in 2008, including key regulatory issues, a snapshot of the consumer market, the growth of mobile data services and the development of emerging technologies and networks such as HSDPA.
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Finland and the mobile phone industry: A case study of the return on investment from government-funded research and development
The sudden and dramatic growth of the mobile phone manufacturing sector in Finland is an interesting case study for science and technology (S&T) policy analysts. Mostly on account of the rapidity of this growth against a relatively static situation for the other sub-sectors, the Finnish economic data over the period 1990–2001 can be used without ambiguity to quantify the return of an initial public sector research and development (R&D) expenditure on the growth of a sectoral economy. Although it is apparent from the data that this economic success story is to some extent now running out of steam, the returns to date for all the participants have been astonishing. Using the Patterson–Hartmann model, which has been developed to link company-level R&D expenditure with product revenue, it is shown that government has managed to achieve a multiplier effect of about 66 on its initial R&D expenditure through initially a leveraging of business R&D expenditure (at a level of 1:3) and then the translation of the latter into an increase in gross domestic product (GDP) (at a level of 1:22). These figures are extraordinarily high, even in comparison to the multipliers obtained by large private sector companies...
The keys to the success were both the vision and foresight of the Finnish R&D community, who identified cell phones as a major growth opportunity, the sharing of risk by the various role players (government, universities and industry) as can happen in an efficient national system of innovation, and finally a sustained commitment to R&D by the industry leaders. The latter has now reached a level of 3.5% of GDP (2005), which makes Finland a global leader in R&D expenditure (as a percentage of GDP). The lessons for developing countries such as South Africa, which are moving towards higher levels of R&D expenditure but within a resource constrained context, are apparent.
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