Not many people outside of Finland know much about the country, but I’m about to make a short trip there for the first time, so I’m reading up about the country. I always like to get to know a new place and this will be the 57th country that I have visited.<\/p>\n
In fact, as an independent nation state, Finland – called Suomi by the Finns – is a relatively new nation. Finland was a part of\u00a0Sweden from the 12th to 19th century, and from 1809 to 1917 was\u00a0an autonomous Grand Duchy within the\u00a0Russian Empire. The\u00a0Finnish Declaration of Independence from\u00a0Russia came on 6 December 1917 so, as an independent country, it is less than 100 years old.<\/p>\n
This year is the 200th anniversary of Helsinki –\u00a0which was founded in 1550 – as\u00a0the country’s capital, since in 1812 the Russian rulers moved the capital from Turku. This year Helsinki is also World Design Capital.<\/p>\n
In population terms, Finland is a small country with a total population of 5.4 million. Helsinki has a population of around 600,000.<\/p>\n
In geographical terms, however, it is a large country in European terms – almost the size of Germany. Two-thirds of the country is covered in forest and the far North forms part of the Arctic Circle.<\/p>\n
Currently the Finnish economy is one of the most robust in Europe. While unemployment is 7.5% and inflation is 2.9%, the country has generous welfare provision and income per capita is among the highest in Europe.<\/p>\n
At the moment, it is the only country in the Eurozone with a stable triple-A credit rating. This is partly because, on a net basis, the country has no debt since annually it raises in taxes just more than the level of government debt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not many people outside of Finland know much about the country, but I’m about to make a short trip there for the first time, so I’m reading up about the country. I always like to get to know a new place and this will be the 57th country that I have visited. In fact, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9115"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9137,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9115\/revisions\/9137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}