ABSTRACT
This chapter studies trends in income poverty in Finland from 1971 to 1995. This period is characterized by wide variation in economic performance, ranging from frequent cycles in the 1970s through steady growth in the 1980s to a sharp contraction in the 1990s. The chapter reviews macroeconomic and institutional developments over the period. It also reviews previous literature on income poverty in Finland and briefly describes the data sets on which the empirical analyses are based. Standard methods are used to summarize poverty in each year and examine the robustness of the resulting trends of other methods, such as the fraction of median and the equivalence scales that were chosen. The chapter also examines the incidence of poverty among subpopulations and the composition of the poverty population using consistent population breakdowns over the whole period.
