Increased disappointment with EU membership among company executives

Only 62% of respondents see membership as positive

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A recent survey by the Finnish National Fund for Research and Development (SITRA) indicates widespread disappointment among Finnish corporate managers with the results of membership in the European Union.
      The poll, published on Thursday, reveals that 72% of respondents had taken a positive view of Finnish EU membership before Finland joined the EU in 1995. Now only 62% are happy with Finnish membership.
      Peter Ekholm, who conducted the survey, notes that in the autumn of 1990, 83% of Finnish corporate managers had felt that Finland should join the European Community, as it was then called.
      In pondering the reasons for the changing attitudes, Ekholm notes that Finnish corporate leaders had hoped that membership in the EU would spur competition in Finland. "Competition turned out to be quite bloody", he says.
     
In the survey, questionnaires were sent to 2,000 companies, yielding 300 responses. One third of the companies responding to the survey had more than 50 employees.
      About half of the respondents are in the service sector, and 39% are in manufacturing. The regional distribution of responses was quite even, coming from the Helsinki region, other growth centres, and other parts of Finland.
      The corporate managers tended to think that EU membership had benefited Finnish business as a whole better than their particular company or field.
      Seven out of ten felt that EU membership had boosted Finland’s position and its competitiveness, but only one third felt that their own company was one of the winners.
      There was a good deal of frustration over EU bureaucracy. All respondents wanted a reduction of administrative paperwork in the EU, and 94% called for a harmonisation of corporate taxation.
      A majority were also disappointed with trends in corporate taxation, and in EU environmental regulations.


Links:
  SITRA press release: Finnish managers disagree about EU

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