Finland as a place for doing digital business: Finland compared with other Nordic countries

Abstract

The new digital technologies have disturbed the old business practices. Newcomers arrive, old traditional businesses perish, and new rules are created. The ones that know how to adapt to change succeed. The ones that fail to seize opportunities and are reluctant to change disappear. Nations are gaining more important role in promoting digital business. For that reason, this thesis is studying Finland as a place for doing digital business. A comparative research method was used to assess the performance of Finland in the matter of ease of doing business, as well as to study how easy it is for digital businesses to operate in Finland, compared with Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The data analyzed in this research is secondary data. Data sources include the World Bank’s publication “Doing Business” from the last five years, World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness report and European Commission’s Human Capital reports. In addition, data from the studied countries’ official websites was used. This study compared the above-mentioned countries based on the World Bank’s rankings and on these following aspects: internet speed, cybersecurity, tax on digital business and digitally skilled workforce. The results show that doing business in the Nordic countries studied in this thesis is much easier than doing it in Finland. On the other hand, results show that doing digital business in Finland is much easier than doing it in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.