Nasty negative numbers for the New Year

A Helsingin Sanomat journalist and bird of ill omen collects some really ugly figures to record 2009, a year many would quite like to forget

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By Riitta Vainio
     
      There are now at least a hundred thousand fewer employed citizens in Finland than there were a year ago.
      In one year the rate of employment has gone down by 2.9 percentage points.
      The number of the unemployed grew to the end of November by 63,000, and the rate of unemployment increased by 2.5%-points compared with 12 months previously. At the end of November 2009, the number of employed persons totalled 2,410,000, or 100,000 fewer than a year earlier. There were 78,000 fewer employed men and 22,000 fewer employed women than in November 2008, and the unemployment rate had climbed to 8.5%.
      For the young, things were even grimmer: in the same month, the unemployment rate among those aged 15 to 24 years was 21.1%, which was 7.2%-points higher than in November 2008.
     
This is just a teaser from among the ugly facts compiled by Statistics Finland for our delectation and delivered shortly before the turn of the year. Few of their figures provide much room for optimism.
      I, too, started compiling some statistics towards the end of 2009.
     
The summary of my searching makes depressing winter reading.
      The present economic situation is bad to the bone, and the figures supporting this view are of such a nature that their fixing for the better is going to take a long time.
      Just check out the following data.
      The industrial confidence barometer headed south in November, and the unsold products started piling up in storerooms and warehouses.
      The Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) announced a month ago that the confidence indicator is clearly below the long-term average.
      The confidence indicators are used to describe the business cycle development.
     
October’s retail sales figures were down by 1.8 per cent compared with one year earlier. Retail sales volume was also off by the same amount.
      The wholesale trade was down by 20.7% and car sales by 26.7%.
      Trade sales figures in aggregate were 16.7 per cent below the October 2008 level.
      Between January and the end of October, retail trade sales fell by 2.4%. Over the same 10-month period, motor vehicle sales were 31.7% lower and wholesale trade sales 20.2% down on the year before. The cumulative annual change for trade sales as a whole was a meaty -17.2%.
      In the service industries, the total turnover generated for the third quarter from July-September was 8.8% lower than in Q3/2008. For June-August, the corresponding three-month figure was 7.9% down from the year before.
     
The building companies saw their net sales for July-September declining by nearly 16% from the corresponding quarter in 2008.
      Over the same three-month period, the turnover of construction of actual buildings fell by 17.9% against Q3/2008, that of specialised construction activities by 15.9%, and that of civil engineering projects by 8.6%.
     
It gets worse. Turnover in manufacturing contracted by 27.6% per cent in July to September 2009 from the year before.
      The tourism sector is not doing too well, either, for the number of overnight stays by foreign travellers at Finnish accommodation establishments fell by 11% in September and 9% in October, compared with the previous year, and even the Finns were more sluggish, down by 4% and 1% respectively in the number of night spent in hotels and other accomodation.
     
In January-November the number of bankruptcies grew in Finland by nearly 25 per cent.
      The number of debt adjustments for private citizens also grew somewhat in January-September, though admittedly things are nothing like as bad as in the early 1990s, while debt restructuring for businesses showed a steep increase for the entire first half of the year.
      Things were up sharply on this front not just in terms of the number of companies but particularly for the number of employees affected.
     
Finland's foreign trade balance did at least go back into surplus in October after being in the red for August and September, but even this glimpse of daylight contains a caveat: were it not for the sale of the gargantuan Oasis of the Seas cruise liner, registered in October's figures and worth a cool one billion euros, exports would have been down by 31% year-on-year instead of the 14% decline that was recorded to October.
      During 1-10/2009, exports have fallen by 34% (as have imports), and the accumulated trade balance of 1,818 million to the end of October is more than a billion euros smaller than it was in 2008.
     
And one more thing amidst all this misery: while there is shortage of everything else, there is plenty of waste to go around. Yay!
      The amount of municipal waste has grown throughout the entire decade at a rate of a couple of percentage points each year.
      The latest figure (for 2008) is 2.8 million tons, which is more than ever before, and represents something like 520 kilos of the stuff for every man, woman, and child - gainfully employed or otherwise - in the country.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 3.1.2010
     
     
Note: More of this depressing reading can be had from the Statistics Finland site. Never let it be said that we only give you a glossy image of Finland. Sometimes the warts are quite too large to Photoshop them out.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Finland´s foreign trade balance turns positive again (11.12.2009)

Links:
  Statistics Finland - Recent Releases in Chronological Order
  Statistics Finland: Number of employed 100,000 lower than one year ago (22.12.2009)

RIITTA VAINIO / Helsingin Sanomat
riitta.vainio@hs.fi