---
title: "Worries About the Economy and Unemployment | Mauri Kotamäki | Negotiator 167"
titleOriginal: "Kansantalouden huolet ja työttömyys | Mauri Kotamäki | Neuvottelija 167"
episodeNumber: "167"
guest: "Mauri Kotamäki"
datePublished: 2022-12-25
duration: "40:35"
youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbUCWR81oj0"
originalLanguage: "fi"
topics: ["finnish_economy_policy"]
subtitleMethod: "none"
provenance: "Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata and the neuvottelija.fi episode record. The publisher published no chapter marks for this episode, so none are listed here. No transcript is published either — the channel has no English caption track for this episode and the Finnish one is YouTube's automatic track. The guest is chief economist of a state-owned financing company, and the episode discusses state financing instruments among other things; the macro readings are those of late December 2022 and several have since resolved."
fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/244-kansantalouden-huolet-ja-tyottomyys-mauri-kotamaki-neuvottel"
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep167-kansantalouden-huolet-ja-tyottomyys-mauri-kotamaki/
---
# Worries About the Economy and Unemployment | Mauri Kotamäki | Negotiator 167

English subtitles are not available on this page. This is an episode summary, not a curated transcript.

## Summary

Mauri Kotamäki, chief economist of the Finnish export credit agency Finnvera, goes through the macro picture at the turn of the year: central banks slowing the pace of rate rises, inflation turning first in the United States and later in Europe. The conversation also asks whether fiscal dominance was ever the binding constraint many expected it to be, and why accelerating inflation in Japan is larger news than it looks. Kotamäki uses the data to separate how much of the rise in employment is policy and how much is world growth, and why Finland's structural unemployment stays high regardless. It closes on electricity subsidies, the self-employed pension reform, and a comparison between the Chinese and Soviet growth models.

## Separating policy from the world economy

The useful move in this episode is arithmetic rather than rhetorical. Employment rose; the question is how much of that is the government's doing and how much is a world economy that was growing anyway. Kotamäki does the decomposition rather than asserting a share, which is what makes the answer worth citing in either direction.

## The part the cycle does not reach

Structural unemployment sits underneath the cycle and does not move with it. That is why a good headline employment figure and an unchanged structural problem are not a contradiction, and why Kotamäki treats the two numbers as answers to different questions.

## Japan as the counter-example that ended

Japan spent decades as the standing exception to the story that money and inflation are connected. Inflation accelerating there removes the exception, which is a bigger event for the framework than its size in the world economy suggests.


## Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: [Kansantalouden huolet ja työttömyys | Mauri Kotamäki | Neuvottelija 167](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbUCWR81oj0).
A Finnish edition of this episode is published at [www.neuvottelija.fi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/244-kansantalouden-huolet-ja-tyottomyys-mauri-kotamaki-neuvottel).

## In depth

The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode:
[English](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep167-kansantalouden-huolet-ja-tyottomyys-mauri-kotamaki/) · [suomeksi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/economy/ep167-kansantalouden-huolet-ja-tyottomyys-mauri-kotamaki/).

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — Worries About the Economy and Unemployment | Mauri Kotamäki | Negotiator 167, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep167-kansantalouden-huolet-ja-tyottomyys-mauri-kotamaki/, 2022-12-25. For quotes include episode 167 and timestamp.