HELSINKI: Rapidly rising unemployment threatens to give rise to geographic pockets of poverty within Finland, reported the Western media.
The matter has also been highlighted by EU Commission’s reports on European social network. The broadest pockets of poverty are in areas of high unemployment and where homes and properties have lost their value. Given that owner-occupied homes are not being readily sold, start-up capital to move elsewhere is not possible.
Thus, dependency on social benefits is increasing in even more areas and poverty will increase, because the level of basic security benefits has collapsed in relation to the poverty threshold in the last two decades. According to the Western media, earlier transfers had driven the low-income households to the poverty line or above it.
This is no longer the case, as the level of basic security benefits has plummeted in the last two decades in relation to the poverty line. According to reports, the current Finnish government programme has frozen indexation and this has widened the gap between the poverty threshold and support subsidies.
