Paula Lehtomäki, Minister For Foreign Trade and Development: Globalisation has changed Finland’s trade policy
15 September 2004
“Trade policy can be an effective way of increasing competitiveness and a tool for globalisation management only if it is understood clearly as part of Finland’s foreign policy on the whole,” Paula Lehtomäki, Finland’s Minister for Foreign Trade and Development, said at the Paasikivi-seura event held in Helsinki on 15 September.
“During the past fifteen or twenty years, our trade policy environment has changed extremely rapidly. Globalisation has meant that economic activity is less and less purely national, such as exports from and imports to the area of a particular country”, Minister Lehtomäki said in characterising the change.
“Globalisation management is largely an economic issue,” Minister Lehtomäki stated. She said that Finland’s objective is a clearly more transparent world economy where international regulations are used to create competitive conditions that are as predictable and equal as possible. According to Lehtomäki, most often trade policy measures can no longer concentrate on protecting or maintaining a particular state of affairs.
According to Minister Lehtomäki, as far as trade policy is concerned, alongside globalisation the key change for Finland has been membership of the European Union. “Instead of independent economic relations, exerting influence especially within the European Union has become a central tool in our trade policy. In the Draft for the new EU Constitution, the authority of the common trade policy extends even further. The challenge has by no means shrunk with enlargement of the European Union,” Lehtomäki stated.
Consideration for developing countries, too, is a permanent component of our economic foreign policy, the minister states. “In our foreign policy we should strive to promote developing countries’ capacity to participate in international trade as part of national strategies aiming to reduce poverty. Foreign trade in itself is insufficient to bolster the poorest developing countries, but it is a significant factor enabling developing,” she continued.
Additional information: Press Attaché Anna Tonttila, tel. +358 40 5131 669.