Unemployment and Labour Market Flexibility: Finland.

This book is one of a series assessing the response of various national labour markets, government policies, and industrial enterprises to the economic upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s and the associated pursuit of "structural adjustment." The series is designed to compare distinctive frameworks in which adjustment and labour-market reform have been pursued, ranging from the neo-liberal, market-oriented approach of some governments to the consensual, "social corporatist" model that has characterized a few Western European countries. Corresponding studies have been published in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The method used in the studies is one of economics. The topics are studied and analyzed mainly on the basis of various statistics only. The limits of my expertise alone force me to restrict my comments on the book by Lilja, Santamaki-Vuori, and Standing to those of a legal scholar and a lawyer who has closely followed the labour market. It is for this reason that no attempt is made here to compare the studies of the series published in the different countries. In a rough sense, the book conveys a reasonably accurate picture of the changes in the Finnish labour market in the 1970s and the 1980s. The latest statistics available to the writers are from 1988, until which time the Finnish economy and labour market had -- except for a few slight set-backs -- been steadily rising. Some even spoke of the "Japan of Europe." While the book was being written, dark clouds had already started gathering in the ...