Neuvottelija · Articles

EP109 · Economy · first published 2021-11-28

Chamber of Commerce and Taxes | Juho Romakkaniemi | Neuvottelija 109

This is a summary on Neuvottelija — Articles. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

Juho Romakkaniemi, CEO of the Finland Chamber of Commerce, first explains what the chamber system actually is: companies organising themselves, born in the 1500s against pirates, in Finland since 1917 and with statutory duties ranging from the redemption board to real estate agent examinations. He describes three areas of activity — export promotion, advocacy and business self-regulation — and argues that self-regulation often achieves better results than legislation, which is always coarse. On the skills shortage he reports a fresh survey: 75 per cent of companies report a shortage, for the first time across the whole country and every sector, and for two in three it hampers growth. The episode's strongest figure is the tax footprint: company activity generates a 69 billion euro flow into public finances, against a GDP of 275 billion, taxes and charges of a little over 100 billion and a state budget of 65 billion — even when a company makes no profit at all. It closes on the Laffer curve, two Finnish examples of it, and Romakkaniemi's position: he supports an efficiently run Nordic welfare state and is a happy taxpayer up to about 35 per cent. Published 28 November 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy

Chamber of Commerce and Taxes | Juho Romakkaniemi

Summary: In episode 109 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Juho Romakkaniemi, CEO of the Finland Chamber of Commerce. The episode falls into two parts: first what the chamber system is, what it does and why it has statutory duties, then the skills shortage and taxation. The second part holds the episode’s hard core — the tax footprint, a figure that changes how corporate taxation ought to be discussed — and a conversation about the Laffer curve, whose peak Romakkaniemi, a philosopher by training, links to John Rawls. Published 28 November 2021.

A note on reading this. Romakkaniemi speaks as the head of a business organisation, and Miettinen largely shares his premises; nobody arguing the opposite view is present. The tax footprint is the Chamber’s own calculation. Views are attributed by speaker, and figures are reported as they were said in the episode.

Arbitration, and much more

Miettinen and Romakkaniemi know each other from their EU days, when they debated the future and past of the euro, and they have just recorded an episode together for Ivan Puopolo’s Weekly Wisecrack Club. This one is recorded in its “afterglow”.

As a businessman and investment banker, Miettinen says, he really only knows one part of the chamber: arbitration, in which companies settle commercial disputes without going to court. That is only one side of it.

From pirates to the redemption board

Romakkaniemi starts with history. Chambers of commerce were first set up in the 1500s to fight pirates and protect trade routes collectively — they are companies’ own, international, self-organised body. The Finnish chamber system was founded before independence, in the summer of 1917, by decree of Kerensky, prime minister of Russia’s Provisional Government: “a lively 104-year-old youngster”.

Since then a law has given the chamber duties: the LKV and LVV examinations for real estate and rental agents; the redemption board, which appoints arbitrators to fix a fair price for shares in squeeze-out situations; and the private sector’s honorary decorations. Many will remember KHT auditors — the abbreviation meant an auditor approved by the Finland Chamber of Commerce — but five years earlier that task was moved to the Finnish Patent and Registration Office, citing an EU directive. Romakkaniemi’s verdict is pointed: “Many times more people do it, but satisfaction with the service has fallen.”

Miettinen admits he had considered the chambers’ approved board member training, but it was full, so he took a commercial alternative. “The quality stamp is missing”, Romakkaniemi replies: reliability, quality and expertise are what chambers are known for, and in the capital region there is a long queue for the course.

Three areas of activity and self-regulation

The Finland Chamber of Commerce, says Romakkaniemi, has three areas of activity:

  1. Export promotion and trade promotion. Bilateral trade associations in Finland, the FinnCham network abroad and the platform of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Finland; exports are also helped along with trade documents.
  2. Advocacy and competitiveness. Reform proposals on how Finland becomes “a freer market economy and a more prosperous, more competitive country, better for everyone”.
  3. Business self-regulation and responsibility. About a dozen boards and self-regulatory bodies: the arbitration institute, the business practice and redemption boards, the Council of Ethics in Advertising, the food supply chain trading practices board, the LKV and LVV examination board, authorised property valuers and a corporate responsibility board, which defines climate and human-rights responsibility and verifies companies’ plans.

The case for self-regulation is the episode’s most principled point:

We believe that this kind of self-regulation achieves better and more efficient results for the social goals that are wanted. Legislation is always fairly coarse and blunt, and there are always collateral losses.

FinnCham, AmCham and 19 regional chambers

Miettinen asks for a comparison with AmCham. Romakkaniemi explains: AmCham is the community of American companies operating in Finland, while abroad there are 38 FinnChams accredited by the Finland Chamber of Commerce. Chambers work as a network: if a crafts company wants to export to Houston, the contact can be found through the chamber.

Besides the national chamber there are 19 regional chambers of commerce. They are platforms for regional advocacy, involving public economic development bodies and other organisations as well as companies; they train and network. The national chamber is their cooperation body, influencing national and EU legislation on their behalf.

What about the Federation of Finnish Enterprises and the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK)? The Federation has the most members, but over 90 per cent are sole traders and micro-companies. EK is the employers’ associations’ cooperation body, labour-market driven and broad in its advocacy. Of EK’s 15,000-plus member companies, well over 90 per cent are also chamber members: they go to EK for employer services, while “they come to us to network, to train and to exert influence, a bit ideologically, from the standpoint of defending the market economy”. Chamber members also include, for example, the entire forest industry and some 6,000 smaller and unorganised employers.

Living as you teach

The chamber’s courses and its big annual days — tax day, transport day, limited company day, corporate responsibility day — are open to all and cheaper for members. Its executive programmes target middle managers in medium and large companies who are rising into management teams and CEO roles and need to be generalists: strategic and crisis communications, responsibility, brand and stakeholder relations, exports.

The funding model is a principle for Romakkaniemi:

We live as we teach. At the Finland Chamber of Commerce 93 to 95 per cent of our budget, depending a bit on the year, comes from something other than membership fees — from products, services, training, examinations. So we operate like a company.

“The market economy works”, says Miettinen.

The skills shortage: 75 per cent

The chamber regularly surveys its members, produces a big tax study every other year, and does sector studies. The latest was on the labour shortage, and Romakkaniemi remembers the results well:

75 per cent of companies said they have some or a major shortage of skilled labour. First of all, that was the biggest share ever. And for the first time it cut across every part of Finland, every sector and companies of every size.

Two thirds of companies say the shortage hampers their growth. So new jobs and tax revenue go unrealised: “the lack of skilled labour keeps wasting Finnish prosperity”.

Miettinen mentions the previous episode’s guest, Minna Helle, with whom he discussed the technology industry’s bargaining reform. Romakkaniemi’s prescription for the matching problem is broad: Finland has high unemployment and a record number of vacancies at the same time, and the issue is not just skills but wrongly set incentives. The labour market must be freed up and local bargaining increased, unemployment and social security restructured so that taking a job always pays, taxes on work cut and revenue raised relatively more elsewhere — and on top of that Finland needs “a huge amount” of skills-based immigration.

Politics and policy

Miettinen asks whether the chamber is not apolitical, even though Romakkaniemi is sometimes politicised because of his National Coalition background. People mix up party politics and politics, Romakkaniemi says — in English, politics and policy. The chamber is not tied to any party, but it pushes the goals its members have defined together “pretty forcefully”. On average they sit close to the parties right of centre, but there is common ground with all of them.

A political actor is anyone who drives some change in society. That is political activity, but it isn’t necessarily party-political activity.

Is Miettinen a political actor too? “You are a highly political actor”, Romakkaniemi replies: strong opinions and a wish to advance them in public debate are political activity, but not party-political.

Hartz, Persson and twenty lost years

The chamber’s long-term goal is a society that is as good an operating environment for business as possible — free markets, competition and equality of opportunity will, in Romakkaniemi’s view, produce the most prosperous Finland. The problem is that Finland has not managed to renew itself this millennium. In the 1980s financial markets were liberalised; in the early 1990s industry had to reform when trade with the Soviet Union collapsed; EU membership and the euro reshaped competition and financial law. But social security, taxation and the labour market were not reformed, even when globalisation hit at the turn of the millennium:

Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands — the countries competing with us adapted one way or another, with the Hartz reforms or with Persson’s reforms in Sweden.

Finland, he says, has been treading water for twenty years and is dropping out of that peer group; now is the last moment to push the big reforms through. The chamber was about to publish in December its own list of reforms to make Finland a competitive welfare society again. Miettinen remarks that in the meantime one holds one’s breath under the current government.

The Laffer curve and Rawls’s peak

Miettinen recalls the chamber’s former chief economist Mauri Kotamäki, who had moved to Finnvera as chief economist; his successor, Jukka Appelqvist, came from Danske Bank. In Kotamäki’s episode Miettinen tried to get him to admit that the Laffer curve is real, and “he partly did”: economists argue that the effect varies by tax and that dynamic effects are not known with certainty.

For Romakkaniemi the curve is trivially true:

At a zero tax rate the yield is zero, and at a hundred per cent it isn’t zero, because you’re in total totalitarianism where all the fruits of labour are taken away at gunpoint — but it’s pretty close to zero, and welfare certainly isn’t maximised.

In between lies “the state’s honey pot”, where as much has been extracted from everyone as possible without activity starting to choke. Romakkaniemi, a philosopher by training, likens it to John Rawls’s theory of justice: Rawls’s peak is the Laffer curve’s peak, the level of income differences at which society’s tax revenue, and so its transfers to the worst off, is maximised. “Unless those transfers go to the elite, as they always partly do.”

The tax footprint: 69 billion

Miettinen returns to a figure he remembers from his conversation with Kotamäki: private-sector companies collect and pay over to the state some 69 billion euros in taxes and tax-like charges. Romakkaniemi explains that the chamber publishes a big tax study every two years; the last was done as a team by Mauri Kotamäki and the chamber’s lead tax expert, Emmiliina Kujanpää.

The idea is borrowed from the carbon footprint. Just as companies measure the emissions their activity causes in total, the chamber measures the money flows to finance the welfare society that arise simply because companies exist and operate. Included are the taxes and charges a company pays itself, the taxes and social charges it pays over from employees’ wages, VAT — the biggest item — environmental taxes, excise duties and, as “a small slice”, corporation tax.

Miettinen notes that this leaves about 30 billion of the 100-billion total, which the public sector collects from its own employees — money circulating within the system. Companies running “taxation as a platform” is, in his view, something everyone receiving transfers should be grateful for. Romakkaniemi gives the proportions:

Finland’s GDP is 275 billion. That’s the entire value added that is created. Taxes and charges altogether are a little over 100 billion. The state budget is 65 billion. And companies’ tax footprint out of all this is 69 billion euros. That’s a tremendous amount.

His main point is about the debate: “some clever economists” stare only at the amount of corporation tax paid, although a company that made no profit for years would still generate an enormous amount of tax revenue.

Infrastructure is not a given

Miettinen adds that the whole collection system is “a massive infrastructure” that should not be taken for granted. In a more chaotic society VAT would never be paid over but “slipped under the counter”. That is why, he says, it is worth asking whether taxation should keep being tightened.

Romakkaniemi continues: at some point new activity, entrepreneurial risk and extra work stop being rewarding, so rates can be raised but the yield no longer grows because activity falls — “the worst possible disservice to the welfare society and to society’s weakest”.

Miettinen quotes Petri Roininen, CEO of Investors House, who had just become chair of the Blue Reform party: Finland’s overall tax rate of about 42.5 per cent puts it in the top two per cent of the world’s states, “so 98 per cent of states tax less”. Miettinen thinks Finland is pretty close to the Laffer peak, “if not a bit past it for a few taxes”.

Romakkaniemi’s line is broad, tight tax bases and lower rates, so that capital is allocated neutrally and companies and people invest:

It isn’t a granary a politician can go to every year to fetch a certain amount. It has to be generated again every year through work.

Miettinen adds wealth: Finland’s private wealth, he says, is about 700 billion euros, roughly three times GDP, while in wealthy Western countries such as Sweden and the United States it is five times GDP. He considers it a function of the tax rate, and taking from the rich “the fools’ way of lengthening a blanket”.

Romakkaniemi’s answer is popular capitalism: build incentives for people on low and middle incomes so that they keep more, save and invest — “that is the key to Finland’s future wealth and prosperity”.

Miettinen thanks the government for approving the equity savings account and for rationalising the taxation of employee shares in unlisted companies. Romakkaniemi points out that the equity savings account was the project of Petteri Orpo as finance minister in the Sipilä government; Miettinen gives the current government credit for not killing it. Romakkaniemi questions the 50,000-euro cap and proposes a tax-free initial band in capital income taxation, so that small dividends would be tax-free and people on low incomes would learn to save, invest and own.

Avoir fiscal and the corporation tax cut

Miettinen says he interviewed Esko Aho, who recalled that one of the most effective levers in the recession of the early 1990s was the tax reform and the avoir fiscal system, which simplified and lowered tax rates and dramatically increased state and municipal tax revenue. Romakkaniemi explains the mechanism: a single tax rate was adopted, and corporation tax could be credited against dividend tax, creating a simple taxation of investment returns.

On paper it should have crashed tax revenue, but it blew it up into growth, because profits were reported, people wanted to invest and it was profitable.

The second example is the Katainen government, in which, under finance minister Jutta Urpilainen, corporation tax was cut from about 26 per cent to 20. That too was supposed on paper to reduce revenue, but according to Romakkaniemi it increased it considerably: “There too we were on the other side of the Laffer curve, as we saw empirically.”

He adds that a tax cut is not a patent remedy that always brings more revenue. But at very high tax rates “material has been loaded into the tank” so that a tax cut can produce dynamic effects and in some cases raise revenue. Miettinen stresses incentives: if everything is maxed out, why bother seeking growth?

A happy taxpayer up to 35 per cent

Romakkaniemi sums up his own position:

I support the Nordic welfare state, but efficiently organised and as an enabling structure, not produced inefficiently and ideologically as a passivating structure — that kind of welfare state I oppose.

And when people talk of happy and unhappy taxpayers: “I’m a happy taxpayer up to about 35 per cent. After that, very sad.”

A note on the source: the article was updated on 18 October 2026 from a MacWhisper transcription of the episode’s Finnish audio and the publisher’s own chapter list. The transcript has no speaker labels, so speakers are inferred from context: for example, the Laffer–Rawls comparison is Romakkaniemi’s, because Miettinen immediately remarks on his background in philosophy, and the “happy taxpayer” statement opens with “I too”, after which Miettinen responds and closes the episode. The remarks on the 30-billion gap in the tax footprint and on the collection system as infrastructure are Miettinen’s. The transcript’s “Emmi Linnan Kujanpää” is the chamber’s then lead tax expert, Emmiliina Kujanpää. One sentence of Romakkaniemi’s about the dividend taxation of unlisted and listed companies is unclear in the transcript and has not been interpreted.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 109, published 28 November 2021, running time 30 minutes 17 seconds. Guest Juho Romakkaniemi (guest page and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 109 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 28 November 2021) Sami Miettinen interviews Juho Romakkaniemi, CEO of the Finland Chamber of Commerce, about the chamber system and taxation. Key findings: chambers of commerce were born in the 1500s against pirates as companies’ own organisation; the Finnish system was founded in the summer of 1917 by Kerensky’s decree and carries statutory duties (LKV and LVV examinations, the redemption board, honorary decorations; KHT auditing was moved to the Patent and Registration Office); there are three areas of activity — export promotion, advocacy and business self-regulation, which in Romakkaniemi’s view often reaches better results than always-coarse legislation; 93–95 per cent of the chamber’s budget comes from sources other than membership fees; 75 per cent of companies report a skills shortage, for the first time across the whole country and every sector, and for two in three it hampers growth; Romakkaniemi’s remedies are local bargaining, incentive reform of social security, lower taxes on work and skills-based immigration; the chamber is party-politically unaligned but a political actor (politics vs. policy); Germany, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands reformed (Hartz, Persson) while Finland has been treading water for 20 years; the Laffer curve is trivially true, and its peak is, Romakkaniemi says, the same as the peak in John Rawls’s theory of justice; companies’ tax footprint is 69 billion euros, against a GDP of 275 billion, taxes and charges of a little over 100 billion and a state budget of 65 billion, and a company generates tax revenue even without profit — corporation tax is only a small slice; Miettinen puts Finnish private wealth at about 700 billion, three times GDP; Romakkaniemi favours broad tax bases, lower rates, popular capitalism and a tax-free initial band in capital income tax; the Finnish Laffer examples are avoir fiscal in the 1990s and the cut in corporation tax from about 26 to 20 per cent under the Katainen government, both of which, he says, raised revenue; Romakkaniemi supports an efficiently organised Nordic welfare state and is a happy taxpayer up to about 35 per cent. Related episodes: Tax elasticities and earnings-related benefit | Mauri Kotamäki and Reason and Emotion in Labour Markets | Minna Helle.

Chapters

Markdown: index.md · Suomeksi