Head North, Mobile Executives! Special Tax Advantages in the Nordic Countries

摘要

In the mid-1990s, around the time that Nokia Corporation was making its watershed breakthrough on the road to becoming a global handset monolith, serious discussions were held in Finland about the country's high tax burden on foreign employees' salaries. Different corporate actors made the pitch that Finland's high tax rate on foreign workers could jeopardise the country's rising global competitiveness. Besides Nokia, other large Finnish-based corporations were also making significant in-roads into earlier uncharted territories. Finnish companies were steadily advancing in their international reach and needed foreign workers to increase their competence base - and they needed them now. These were interesting times in Finland and are cited as a period when the country pushed itself onto the world stage as an export-driven economy with the high-technology goods needed to satiate an increasingly interconnected international marketplace.