Neuvottelija · Articles

EP413 · Economy · first published 2026-10-09

The €159 Billion Public Sector Nobody Studies | Aki Kangasharju, Emmiliina Kujanpää | Negotiator 413

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

Etla chief executive Aki Kangasharju and EVA tax specialist Emmiliina Kujanpää return to Neuvottelija after a media storm in which Kangasharju's view that Finland's debt brake is too strict was read as support for the line that nothing needs to be cut. He explains the impossibility triangle of Etla's book Suomi 2051 and makes the episode's weightiest admission: research on public-sector productivity and efficiency has been neglected in Finland for some twenty years, although public spending is about €159 billion a year. Kujanpää asks what taxpayers get for tax rises. The conversation covers the corporate tax cut, in-house procurement by wellbeing services counties, falling PISA results against rising spending per pupil, the weight of pensions, the uncertainty of international size comparisons, inheritance tax and the Swedish model, and the Tax Administration's appeals unit. On reduced VAT rates the participants disagree. The article separates checked figures from the participants' judgements; all three favour spending-led consolidation.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy + AI and Society

The €159 Billion Public Sector Nobody Studies | Aki Kangasharju, Emmiliina Kujanpää | Negotiator 413

Summary: Aki Kangasharju, chief executive of Etla, and Emmiliina Kujanpää, tax specialist at EVA, return to Neuvottelija eighteen months after the mid-term review episode. The starting point is a media storm: Kangasharju’s view that Finland’s debt brake is too strict was read as support for the line that nothing needs to be cut. The weightiest moment of the episode is a different admission. Finland has researched a great deal about what taxation costs, and almost nothing about what public spending buys:

“We know there is inefficiency in there, but we have completely neglected research on public-sector productivity and efficiency for the last 20 to 25 years.”

Kujanpää asks the same question from the taxpayer’s side: what does the voter get for the tax rises every party is now talking about?

How to read this

Who the participants are. Kangasharju runs Etla and, formally, EVA as well; both are funded by business. Earlier he was a research director at VATT, the government’s economic research institute. Kujanpää is EVA’s tax specialist. Both argue in the episode that public finances should be consolidated mainly on the spending side and that taxes should come down for the sake of growth. Sami Miettinen agrees and says so. This is therefore not a debate between two schools but a conversation inside one school about why its message is not getting through. The opposing view, for example VATT studies that found the effects of tax cuts to be small, appears in the episode only as a target of criticism. The article brings it in where it matters.

What the article does. It separates checkable figures from the participants’ professional judgements and from the points on which they disagree with one another. The episode’s claims are checked against public sources at the end.

Source. The article rests on the publisher’s own Finnish caption track and chapter list. Quotations are translated from spoken Finnish for sense, not verbatim.

1. An unholy alliance: how criticism of the debt brake became support for not cutting

Miettinen opens on the attack. In public, Kangasharju has ended up on the same side as Minja Koskela, leader of the Left Alliance, “in this kind of unholy alliance”, because his view that the debt brake is too strict was read to mean that spending need not be cut. In Miettinen’s view that gave cover to those who think a €15 billion annual deficit can simply continue because cutting is unpleasant.

Kangasharju admits the outcome: “The baby went out with the bathwater, a really big baby, and the nappies too.” According to him, the Kauppalehti interview where it started carried a different message for anyone who read to the end. He calls the reading deliberate.

The economic-policy impossibility triangle

The interview was based on Etla’s 80th-anniversary book Suomi 2051 (edited by Aki Kangasharju and Petri Rouvinen), published on 2 September 2026. Its thesis as Kangasharju tells it in the episode:

  1. The necessity of reform is clear. Waiting will not bring growth, even though some economists, he names Seppo Korkman and Vesa Vihriälä, with whom he had just debated, believe growth will return by itself.
  2. Political acceptability is the traditional counterweight: every reform has opponents, and there is a trade-off between efficiency and equity.
  3. The debt brake adds a third corner: a rule that reforms may not be made “if they cost the public sector a single cent in the short run”.

All three corners cannot be reached at once, Kangasharju says. Etla’s proposal is to give a little on the last two, “interpret them a bit more flexibly, not abandon them”, and to spend the room on reforms that cost money in the short run but pay for themselves over the long run. The criticism he got from his own side was political realism: “Don’t you understand the game? Give politics a cent and it takes two.”

He also points to selective criticism. The current government’s last budget is being called an election budget because consolidation ends, although every government makes election budgets. “But I do admit my mistake in the current situation.”

What is interpretation here. The impossibility triangle is Etla’s own frame, not an established concept in economics, and its corners are described differently in different places: in Etla’s press release the triangle is growth incentives, public-sector efficiency and political acceptability, while in the episode Kangasharju names the debt brake as the third corner. We did not check the Kauppalehti interview that started the storm; the account rests on Kangasharju’s own description. Which reforms actually pay for themselves is exactly the question economists disagree on (section 2).

2. Spending or tax cuts, and the corporate tax cut

Miettinen caricatures the left’s reading: public investment is always good because it is distribution, but lowering a tax rate, which reduces one year’s revenue, is “the wrong kind of investment”. For him the latter is more effective, because “the payoff comes really fast”.

Kujanpää takes the cut in corporate tax from 20 to 18 per cent as her example. It is before Parliament (government bill HE 151/2026, estimated cost about €841 million a year) and takes effect at the start of 2027. Her main claim is that corporate tax revenue follows company profits more than the rate: over this century the state of the economy explains revenue far better than the percentage, and according to her Etla has shown this with statistics on its blog. The rate is still one of the costs of investment, and if investment rises, the biggest tax revenue, she says, comes from the payroll taxes of the people who build it.

Miettinen generalises: in Finnish debate, spending from the public purse is assumed to have multiplier effects, but money taken from the private sector is not. “Every tax is a harmful tax, a stone in the shoe of the dynamic side of the economy.”

Where this is contested. VATT’s study of the 2014 corporate tax cut (24.5 → 20 per cent) found no rise in investment among small unlisted companies in the first three years. Later in the episode Kangasharju refers to exactly this: “everybody just points to that one VATT study”, which in his view cannot be used in this debate because it does not capture general-equilibrium effects on wages and VAT. There is strong evidence in the literature that part of corporate tax is passed on to wages (for example Fuest, Peichl and Siegloch 2018 on German municipalities: about half), but there is no consensus that Finland’s cut pays for itself. The companion expert article linked at the end takes this further.

3. What does the taxpayer get?

Kujanpää’s question is the backbone of the episode:

“I haven’t heard anyone say what the voter actually gets for those tax rises. What is the public service promise, what do you get for your tax money? How does it change if taxes go up next year? Does anyone get anything more or not?”

Politicians, she says, talk about taxes like a crank you turn to make more money come out, not about what people must provide for themselves.

Miettinen offers a comparison: if Finland’s tax ratio is about 41 per cent and Switzerland’s about ten points lower, then on a GDP of about €300 billion the gap is €30 billion a year of purchasing power for households and companies. Kangasharju notes that Switzerland is a very different country. The figure is an order of magnitude: Finland’s GDP is about €280 billion, and according to the OECD Finland’s tax ratio was 42.2 per cent in 2024 against an OECD average of 34.1, with Switzerland well below. The direction of the comparison holds, but the exact figure depends on what is counted as tax, pension contributions above all (section 7).

4. The research that was shut down

This is the most important part of the episode, and it is said by the head of a research institute about his own field.

At VATT, Kangasharju was research director and research professor for the effectiveness of public services from 2001 to 2012, and its director general in his final year, so he is talking about his own work. Economists, he says, have studied the incidence and behavioural effects of taxation a great deal, if very much at micro level and without general-equilibrium effects. How public money is used, by contrast, is “overwhelmingly less” understood:

“I know this from experience. When I was research director and professor at VATT we tried to start it, and we got off to a fairly good start. Today you could say those were clumsy studies in the early 2000s, but research is always clumsy at first. Now the data and the computers are on a completely different level. But in the last 10 to 15 years this research has been shut down completely.”

The result, in his account, is two distortions. First, there are only anecdotes about inefficiency: the papers report that 30 per cent of hospital operations are unnecessary; Anita Lehikoinen, long-time permanent secretary of the Ministry of Education and Culture, said on retiring, according to him, that nobody runs the education system; and the social security committee, after seven years, has not, in his words, produced a single reform proposal. The last two need qualifying: Lehikoinen was permanent secretary from 2013 to May 2025, about 12 years rather than 16, and we could not find the quotation in public sources. The social security committee’s term runs from 2020 to 2027 and it has published 18 position papers; its final report is still to come, so “zero” describes finished legislative proposals, not the committee’s work. Second, when something is known about the harms of taxation and nothing about the efficiency of public production, the debate tilts: the harms of taxation are underestimated because general-equilibrium effects are not counted, and room for efficiency on the spending side does not exist because it has not been measured.

Kujanpää pins down the scale: total general government expenditure is about €159 billion a year, “the second-largest in the world together with France”. “We have this huge bundle of resources that nobody even tries to poke.” The figure holds: Statistics Finland’s preliminary data put public expenditure at 57.4 per cent of GDP in 2025, which is about €159 billion. The ranking is if anything an understatement: according to Eurostat, Finland’s expenditure ratio in 2024 was the highest in the euro area (57.6 per cent), with France second (57.1).

Does the claim hold? Its structural core does. Statistics Finland’s productivity statistics for municipalities and joint municipal authorities, which measured the volume of output and productivity of education, health and social services, were last published in March 2013 with data for 2011, and no new data is produced. THL still publishes hospital productivity statistics, and the unit-cost project for social and health services coordinated by the Ministry of Finance ended in February 2026, but its calculations stayed at the level of an average across the wellbeing services counties because the counties record their services and costs differently. So Finland has no national, quality-adjusted productivity series for the public sector. “Shut down completely” is still an overstatement: scattered research and hospital-level measurement continue, but there is no overall picture.

5. Wellbeing services counties: in-house, money following the patient, and physician-managers

Buying from their own companies

Last year Kujanpää analysed large wellbeing services counties’ purchases from companies they own (the EVA analysis Maan tapa, November 2025, which estimates public-sector in-house procurement at about €7 billion a year). The public sector can avoid competitive tendering by owning even a small stake in a company that produces the same services as private ICT firms. Whenever this is challenged, she says, the answer is always the same: “What about school meals in small municipalities?” That, to her, is a different matter from the large counties’ in-house ICT, where savings would be possible. In a country the size of Finland it makes no sense for the public sector to have its own procurement companies while private firms that could deliver the same services cannot sell them to the public sector.

For background: the in-house exception rests on EU procurement law; in October 2025 the Supreme Administrative Court held that Sarastia was no longer an in-house entity of its owners; and a 2025 review of competitive neutrality found that the neutrality rules are poorly followed in the public sector. We found no research on whether in-house procurement raises or lowers costs, which is part of the same gap.

Money follows the patient: the 2010 model

Miettinen asks whether consumers could choose for themselves, recalling the books he wrote for the think tank Libera, which discussed the line between public and private goods through service vouchers and purchaser–provider models. Kangasharju says he wrote a report in 2010 with Timo Aronkytö, now director of the Vantaa and Kerava wellbeing services county. The model:

The ideas died, he says, because when the health and social services reform was being made “everything private comes straight from Satan”. Miettinen calls the present system “East German”: monoliths handle the flow of patients with no efficiency metric. The Sipilä government’s model, in his view, would have brought the best practice of occupational health care and private personal doctors.

Cuts to services, never to inefficiency

According to Kangasharju, the assumption is that the public sector is at least as efficient as the private, so every cut is read as a cut to services. “Nobody can be bothered to study it and say that there is actually quite a lot of room for efficiency there.”

Kujanpää adds two structural reasons: public employees are a large share of voters, which pulls the debate towards preserving structures, and the population is ageing, “the older we get, the more we resist change”. Miettinen puts public-sector employment at about 700,000 (the figure holds: the state, the municipal sector and the social security funds employ about 705,000 in total), says Switzerland would have half that, and criticises the three-tier administration: 308 municipalities, 45 employment areas, 21 wellbeing services counties and the state, each with its own middlemen.

Kangasharju describes how efficiency ideas get lost in a wellbeing services county: the director has to be a physician rather than a professional manager, the higher you go the more political decisions become, and in the end the same people sit as MPs, municipal councillors and county councillors. “The top leaders don’t think about Finland’s debt at all, only about how to secure these resources for ourselves.”

Kujanpää offers a counterweight: she understands people in small towns who are losing local services. Paying taxes does not tell you whether you will get the services that matter to you. This is one of the few points in the episode where the human cost of cuts is said out loud.

6. Tax scepticism, PISA and pensions

Willingness to pay tax. According to Kujanpää, Finns have grown more critical of taxation, and the Tax Administration is worried about it too, but reads it as a need for more enforcement and powers. Kujanpää reads it differently: when money has alternative uses and the use of tax money is visible, scepticism is “a really healthy phenomenon”.

PISA and spending. Kangasharju’s example of inefficiency: PISA results have fallen since 2006, while real spending per pupil has risen. “We keep pushing more money per pupil, more than inflation, and still get fewer results. Something is fundamentally wrong here.” The PISA decline is a fact: Finland’s mathematics score was 548 in 2006 and 484 in 2022. But results fell in almost every OECD country, and there is no consensus on a causal link between spending and outcomes. Two time series moving in opposite directions are a good question, not yet an answer.

Pensions. According to Kangasharju, if ageing is taken out, Finland spends no more on public services than in the early 2000s: pensions and elderly care absorb the growth. There is room for efficiency in elderly care, he says, but the pension system has not been reformed enough.

7. Is Finland’s public sector really the largest?

Here Kangasharju brakes his own side. Miettinen points out that of the €159 billion total, about €40 billion is pension flows that do not pass through the state budget but through the TyEL, YEL and MyEL earnings-related schemes, “a sort of extra-parliamentary system”, yet appear in many statistics as part of the tax ratio, as an employee contribution, an employer contribution or both.

Kangasharju draws the conclusion:

“When people say Finland has the largest public sector in the world, or the second largest after France, that isn’t so. We simply don’t know the size of the public sector, because pensions and tax collection are organised so differently.”

In the statistics, he says, Finland’s public sector is about eight percentage points larger than the weighted average of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, about €25 billion. “That sounds shocking”, but part of the difference is explained by pension systems, so it is hard to say from the headline figures where to cut. Miettinen still concludes that the deficit of about €15 billion could be taken from the spending side, since turning the tax screw yields a little in the first year and then destroys growth, and that AI could carve out “big juicy slices with a lightsaber”.

This matters for the article: the same participant who demands more efficient spending says that international size comparisons cannot be trusted. The claim that Finland’s public sector is at the top of the table is statistically true, in the euro area it was even first in 2024, but its interpretation is uncertain, and that uncertainty is one more reason to study spending itself rather than only its size.

8. Marginal tax rates and spending-led consolidation

Kangasharju tells two stories about how the economists’ debate has shifted. When he started talking about cutting top marginal tax rates five or six years ago, other economists said he had lost his mind; now “no normal economist opposes it any more”. The second shift concerns the mix of consolidation: the Katainen government, he says, consolidated two-thirds through taxes and one-third through spending, whereas most economists now hold that consolidation should be spending-led.

Miettinen recalls the debate at the start of the government’s term about the temporary two-point solidarity tax, whose removal was treated for weeks as stupidity. (The Orpo government did not in the end abolish the tax but raised its income threshold to €150,000.) The conversation also notes that more than half of Finns intuitively consider it unreasonable to pay more than half of additional income in tax.

The evidence. Alesina, Favero and Giavazzi’s Austerity (2019) is the best-known study finding that spending-led consolidation is less harmful to growth than tax-led consolidation. The result is contested: IMF researchers (Guajardo, Leigh and Pescatori 2014) using a different method found clearer contractionary effects. Kangasharju’s “all sensible economists” is therefore an exaggeration, but spending-led consolidation is now mainstream in Finnish fiscal debate too.

9. Inheritance tax: VATT, the Swedish model and generational transfers

Miettinen criticises the government’s inheritance tax decision: a move to the Swedish model, where inheritance tax is replaced by capital gains tax on later sale, was on the table, proposed among others by a working group led by Risto Murto in February 2025, but “they got cold feet”, and only the thresholds were raised: from the start of 2026 the inheritance tax threshold rose from €20,000 to €30,000 and the gift tax threshold from €5,000 to €7,500. A VATT report was raised in support of the decision, which according to Miettinen dealt mainly with real estate rather than business successions or the tax friction of disputes in estates.

The conversation notes that if about 85 per cent of the inheritance and gift tax base is real estate, the conclusion that the tax need not be abolished is right as far as it goes. The focus should instead be on business assets, especially for those who do not qualify for the generational-transfer relief. “Nobody has studied that.”

Kujanpää goes further: when business assets pass to direct descendants, Finland is in her words “an outrageously greedy taxer”. In other countries with an inheritance tax, a child gets a high tax-free threshold or business assets are exempted altogether. “It’s a bit of a fools’ game how we keep telling ourselves that inheritance tax is a terribly good tax”, while a wealth tax is considered a bad tax, although inheritance tax is a wealth tax.

Miettinen also criticises a calculation by the Federation of Finnish Enterprises (February 2025, with Juhana Brotherus as chief economist) according to which the Murto group’s package would raise taxes for 60 to 80 per cent of SME owners: in his view the calculation assumed that inherited assets would be sold immediately under capital gains tax, which no one would do with even the most basic tax planning. Kujanpää directs the same criticism at the Taxpayers’ Association of Finland, which presents inheritance tax and capital gains tax as alternatives to each other: you pay capital gains tax only if you sell, and then you have the cash.

What VATT actually said. According to VATT’s 2025 report, inheritance tax has few behavioural effects, so dynamic effects would not offset the revenue loss; abolition would cost at least €300–400 million a year, and a move to the capital-gains model more. Business assets accounted for about 15 per cent of the revenue. The criticism from Miettinen and Kujanpää therefore hits the report’s scope rather than its calculations: friction in business successions is a different question from the yield of the whole tax, and there is less research on it. The OECD’s 2021 comparison found that inheritance taxes raise on average only about 0.5 per cent of tax revenue and that business reliefs mainly benefit wealthy households, a point that runs against Kujanpää’s international comparison.

AI and inheritance tax. Kujanpää says that when she ran international inheritance-tax comparisons through AI, it repeatedly began by stating that Finnish generational transfers are very favourable and inheritance tax is a good tax. Miettinen: “Trained by Yle.” It is an anecdote, but it says something about which material language models repeat.

10. Reduced VAT rates: the episode’s open dispute

Miettinen is asked what he would do with the reduced VAT rates. He would merge everything at 20 per cent: the general rate down from 25.5 and the others up. His reasons are administrative friction, on a restaurant bill alcohol at 25.5 per cent and food at 13.5, and the example of Denmark with a single 25 per cent rate.

Kangasharju replies that Miettinen has “followed only the headlines and not read the assumptions of the research”. The case for a uniform rate, he says, comes from the Mirrlees Review, which assumes that nobody can substitute home work for market work. “Do you ever clean at home or cook at home? Or buy booze at Alko to take home rather than always going to a restaurant?” His is an employment argument: of those with only basic education, about 40 per cent are in work; of the university-educated, he says, 95 per cent; and low-educated jobs are often in restaurants and cleaning. Lowering VAT on services people could do themselves moves home work into the market.

Kujanpää settles it with a third view: “What Aki says is true. What you say is true too.” According to EVA’s Values and Attitudes survey, only about 2 per cent of Finns would be willing to raise the tax on food even moderately. That is why she calls the government’s decision to cut food VAT from 14 to 13.5 per cent “sharply populist”: it did exactly what voters want. (The participants mix up two changes in the episode: at the start of 2025 the goods in the 10 per cent band, such as books, medicines and passenger transport, moved to 14 per cent, and at the start of 2026 the 14 per cent rate, which includes food, fell to 13.5. Food was therefore not at 14 per cent for only three months.) Zero rates, for example in financial services, also create large wedges, she says: when does a service jump to 25.5 per cent?

This stays open, and rightly so. The participants do not converge. The research partly supports both. Kleven, Richter and Sørensen (2000) showed that a lower tax on market services that substitute for home production can be optimal, the theoretical basis of Kangasharju’s argument. On the other hand, Finland’s own natural experiments have produced modest results: according to VATT, the 2010 restaurant VAT cut lowered prices by only about a quarter of full pass-through and did not raise sales or employment, and the 2007 hairdressers’ cut was passed on to prices by about half, but the volume of services barely changed and hairdressers’ profits rose. Kangasharju’s theory and Finland’s evidence pull in different directions.

11. The Tax Administration’s appeals unit and a ten-year dispute

Miettinen asks Kujanpää to “put some salt” on the Tax Administration. Kujanpää:

“Inside the Finnish Tax Administration we have a 25-strong group whose job is to appeal the Tax Administration’s positive decisions. You know who you are.”

The figure holds: this is the Tax Recipients’ Legal Services Unit, attached to the Tax Administration, which had about 25 person-years in 2024 and lodged 53 appeals with the Supreme Administrative Court that year. The unit represents the interests of the tax recipients, the state, municipalities, parishes and Kela, and can appeal decisions the Tax Administration has made in a taxpayer’s favour. According to Kujanpää, it would be a natural place to start if savings are being sought.

Her example is a case she had just written about on LinkedIn: one inheritance produced two inheritance tax disputes, both of which went to the Supreme Administrative Court. First the Tax Administration had granted generational-transfer relief, then the unit appealed, and a few years later the Tax Administration made a new decision refusing the relief. The heir won both disputes in the Supreme Administrative Court, but the second was only resolved this autumn, about ten years after the death. The heir will not recover legal costs, while the unit has “unlimited time and money”.

Miettinen ties the case to inheritance tax: estate disputes, provisional inheritance tax and the “legal hell machine” of the undivided estate would be unnecessary in the Swedish model, where ownership simply passes on.

The details of the case rest on Kujanpää’s account; the court decisions are not identified in the episode, and we did not identify them.

AI levels the playing field

Miettinen advises listeners to connect Laki.ai’s free MCP server, which retrieves Finnish legislation, court decisions and government bills, and to run their own estate inventory through it. In his estimate the result is worth about a €500 lawyer’s bill, and the same can be done when the Tax Administration sends a request for information. “In the past, if you got a letter from the taxman, you were about ready to kill yourself.” Kujanpää agrees: AI democratises the field between taxpayer and Tax Administration.

Finally Miettinen also puts salt on the Taxpayers’ Association, of which he is no longer a member: he is not convinced by its new chief executive, and its defence of taxpayers is not the best possible if it does not want to give up any types of tax.

12. Absolution, and Etla’s goal

Miettinen grants Kangasharju absolution: he was on the right side and was misunderstood. Kangasharju repeats his line: the fewer reforms, the more literally the debt brake has to be followed, “and then we consolidate until the end of the world”.

The goal of Etla’s anniversary book, he says, is to get back to Sweden’s standard of living and, with real effort, to the average of the other Nordic countries; Etla’s press release puts it as the standard of living of the rest of the Nordic region by 2051. That requires Finnish growth to rise from close to zero, where it has been since 2008, to an average of 2 to 2.5 per cent a year. It takes the book’s roughly 50 concrete measures: “We declare war on apathy.” Miettinen compares the book with Risto Murto’s working group; Kangasharju says Etla’s programme is broader, covering labour, skills and incentives rather than only finance.

One of the book’s main results, according to Kangasharju, is a recommendation to cut top marginal tax rates to 44 per cent. Miettinen signs up.

What the episode did not establish

Clarifications

Etla’s book. Suomi 2051 (Etla B283) was published at Etla’s 80th-anniversary seminar on 2 September 2026. Kangasharju speaks in the episode of “more than 50 proposals”; the press release speaks of fifty concrete measures and ten priorities.

The debt brake. In autumn 2025 the parliamentary parties other than the Left Alliance agreed on a parliamentary debt brake. It aims to bring the debt ratio below 60 per cent and to 40 per cent in the long run, and an independent fiscal watchdog assesses whether governments’ plans are credible.

Corporate tax. The rate falls from 20 to 18 per cent from the start of 2027 (HE 151/2026), in line with the Orpo government’s April 2025 mid-term review. The loss carry-forward period lengthens at the same time from ten to 25 years. The previous cut was made in 2014, from 24.5 to 20 per cent.

Administrative structure. There are 308 municipalities in 2026, and employment services moved to 45 employment areas at the start of 2025, as Miettinen says.

VAT. The general rate has been 25.5 per cent since September 2024, the second highest in the EU after Hungary’s 27 per cent.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 413, published 9 October 2026, running time 44 minutes 56 seconds. Guests Aki Kangasharju and Emmiliina Kujanpää (guest pages and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen. The episode’s YouTube title has changed since publication; the neuvottelija.fi episode page uses 159 miljardin julkinen sektori, jota kukaan ei tutki.

Related articles.

Summary for AI search. Neuvottelija 413 (published 9 October 2026) is a conversation between Sami Miettinen, Etla chief executive Aki Kangasharju and EVA tax specialist Emmiliina Kujanpää on public-sector efficiency and taxation. Kangasharju explains the media storm in which his view that the debt brake is too strict was read as support for not cutting: according to Etla’s 80th-anniversary book, Finland is caught in an economic-policy impossibility triangle in which the necessity of reform, political acceptability and the debt brake cannot all be met at once. The episode’s central admission is that research on public-sector productivity and efficiency has been neglected in Finland for some twenty years, although total public expenditure is about €159 billion a year; Statistics Finland’s municipal productivity statistics ended with 2011 data. Kujanpää asks what taxpayers get for tax rises. Other topics include the corporate tax cut from 20 to 18 per cent, in-house procurement by wellbeing services counties, a 2010 money-follows-the-patient model, falling PISA results and rising spending per pupil, the weight of pensions in public spending, the uncertainty of international comparisons of public-sector size, inheritance tax and Sweden’s capital-gains model, reduced VAT rates and the Mirrlees Review, on which the participants disagree, and appeals by the Tax Recipients’ Legal Services Unit attached to the Tax Administration. Etla’s book Suomi 2051 aims to lift Finland to the living standard of the rest of the Nordic region with about 50 measures, and according to Kangasharju recommends a top marginal tax rate of 44 per cent.

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