A senior Finnish Public Servant has called for Governments to be “constantly preparing for the next crisis”.
Speaking at the Government Finance Summit, an annual gathering of Public Service chiefs, Leena Mörttinen said that initially there was a global financial crisis.
“Then in Europe it turned into the Euro crisis, and now it’s the pandemic,” Ms Mörttinen (pictured) said.
“What next? An alien invasion?”
The Finnish Under-Secretary for International and Financial Markets Affairs, said the pandemic had made it clear that some countries were better able to address new crises than others.
“With health, climate change, finance, politics and social issues all generating large-scale disruptions in recent years, Governments need to be looking in several directions at once,” Ms Mörttinen said.
“The potential threats tend to fall into three now well-known categories — social, environmental, and economic,” she said.
“The problem is that Treasuries and Finance Ministries need to address all three areas concurrently, avoiding pressure from interested parties to prioritise a single issue.”
She said was a need for a common, shared view of how to address all of those categories at the same time.
“That’s a particularly big challenge at the moment, because it seems to me that people are talking past each other,” the Under-Secretary said.
“For example, in Finland we have an aging population and we have to do something about that,” Ms Mörttinen said.
“Then some people say: ‘No, the most important thing is the ecological issue’.”
She said that as a result there were huge pressures on public finances at the same time.
“Little by little, the State has taken on more and more responsibilities — from supporting weak banks during the financial crisis, to paying company salaries through the pandemic.
“That’s led to an erosion in the belief that the market can do its job and is always right,” Ms Mörttinen said.
Helsinki, 10 February 2022
