The northern sparsely populated areas (NSPA) of Finland, Norway and Sweden are becoming increasingly important to the geopolitical and economic interests of these countries and the European Union. These regions have unique geographical characteristics - low population density and a harsh climate...

This paper develops a methodology to define functional rural areas in the EU. It seeks feedback on the method and the results. Functional rural areas cover all the territory outside functional urban areas. They are constructed in three steps. First, we define rural centres: they are the largest...

The output gap is a commonly used tool to assess the state of the business cycle, and as such, a key input for policy makers. In this article, we employ principal components analysis (PCA) to derive an estimate of the output gap in Finland that summarizes the information of widely used cyclical...