Finland boosts high-end academic teaching in economics

A new top economic research center will be established in Helsinki, as Prime Minister Juha Sipilä announced on Tuesday the launch of the new Graduate School of Economics (GSE).

The new institution aims at securing doctoral level education in all major branches of economics in Finland.

Erkki Liikanen, the Governor of the Bank of Finland, said in a statement on Tuesday that the Bank has had difficulty in recruiting doctor level employees with a command of the local languages, Finnish and Swedish.

The project will be practically handled jointly by Helsinki University, Aalto University and the Helsinki Swedish language school of economics.

Beyond the state role as the main financier of universities in Finland, this unit will get additional financing from the Bank of Finland, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education. Education minister Sanni Grahn-Laasonen said the GSE will hopefully also attract private money.

The GSE will employ fifteen professors. Recruitment will be open to both Finnish and international applicants. The school is interested in applicants at various stages of their academic careers.

Sipilä said the GSE will make it possible that Finland in the future will be a growing ground for top economic experts.

Finnish born Nobel laureate Bengt Holmstrom was present at the launch presser. He began his academic career in Finland, but is today a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

During this year "academic brain drain" has been a frequent subject in domestic media. The concept refers to the decisions by high end university researchers to leave Finland and accept employment abroad.

People who have left Finland have often cited bureaucratic academic structures and also uncertainty of long term financing as their grounds for leaving Finland.

“Political decision-making requires high-quality assessments of impacts on the economy and so-ciety. In making impact assessments, we must always be able to do better. The new economics unit will have a significant role in research and high-level legislative preparation. I am delighted to have the opportunity to announce the project with Professor Bengt Holmström,” said Prime Minister Juha Sipilä.

“I am very satisfied that an economics centre will be established in Helsinki. It is coming at the right time. Finnish economics is experiencing a strong upswing just as economics is increasingly needed to analyse and interpret the rapidly growing volume of information. Economics and new methods based on artificial intelligence and machine learning will complement each other. Good experiences of corresponding units have been obtained from Barcelona, Toulouse and Stockholm, for example. The Helsinki GSE has all the prerequisites to join these leading European centres,” said Professor Bengt Holmström.