Centre party boss Juha Sipilä's recent comments that Finland could do with fewer civil servants certainly provoked a debate. The Centre party, the National Coalition party and the Finns party are all keen to cut staffing levels in the public sector, while the other parties are less enthusiastic about slashing jobs. On Monday Sipilä went into more detail, saying that over a decade Finland's public sector could contract by about 20,000 jobs.
So it's only natural that Helsingin Sanomat today asked the question "Are there too many civil servants in Finland?". In a large infographic across two pages, Finland's biggest daily newspaper laid out the extent of employment in the public sector: some 650,000 people. What's more, Sipilä came under fire for not specifying where exactly he felt the cuts should fall.
Although he did say the tax administration was a good example, reducing it's staff by around 2,000 over a decade by increasing use of IT in provision of tax services. HS, though, found Sipilä's statistics problematic. He said the public sector's share of the economy in 2013 was 58 percent. That does not mean, however, that the private sector is restricted to 42 percent of the economy. It means that the public sector's expenditure equals around 58 percent of GDP. The private sector's expenditure is apparently equal to 239 percent of GDP.
HS reports that the government's share of total consumption is just over 20 percent, with 79 percent coming from the private sector.
That's because GDP is calculated by adding together the total sum of goods and services produced in a country. Public spending includes transfer payments (pensions, unemployment benefits and so on), which the recipient then very often spends on goods and services provided by private companies. Spending as a share of GDP includes both the transfer payment and the spending of the recipient, allowing the final figure to be above 100 percent.
Councils budgets
Aamulehti's front page is grim reading for municipalities. The paper leads with the budget difficulties faced by Tampere, the paper's home city, alongside Oulu, Vantaa and Turku. Tampere has the lowest deficit, at 9.9 million euros, with Oulu's at 27.6 million, Turku's at 25.5 million, and Vantaa's amounting to 36.5 million euros.
Tampere also needs to find savings of some 15 million euros in next year's budget, while preserving enough cash to fund investments in several developments across the city. A new outdoor swimming pool, meanwhile, will not be directly funded by the city and therefore remain off the books--but leasing payments will have to be made each year to the firm that does fund the project.
The paper warns in an editorial that the municipality is 'between a rock and a hard place', like many others in Finland, and that the entire municipal workforce is likely to be shaken up in 2015 when the city looks to streamline it's staffing.
Rautavaara tragedy aftermath
The tabloids include extensive updates on Sunday's fatal crash in which a woman and her three children died in Rautavaara. Ilta-Sanomat reports that immediately before her car collided with a bus in which her partner was travelling the couple had argued over childcare, with the mother unhappy about the amount of time her partner, father of the youngest two children, spent at work.
The argument continued by phone right up until tragedy struck, according to IS.