Vigour to Counties

Prime Minister Sipilä’s Government Programme aims at pushing Finland on a path of sustainable growth and improved employment. As a significant part of employment objective in the Government Programme, regional experiments related to labour and business services will be launched during 2017 and 2018. The experiments the organisation of public labour and business services will be appointed to a single municipality or municipalities forming a co-operative region. A total of nine (9) regions have been selected to the experiment, three of which are counties and six municipalities or their co-operative regions.

The ongoing regional government reform has held up the launch of regional experiments. At the same time, the reform will totally reshape the public labour and business services. The organisation of growth services will be appointed to counties, and the production will be based on market mechanism and private services.

Entrepreneurship and Employment to counties project (in Finnish YTYÄ, which translates to vigour) aims at evaluating the regional experiments related to labour and business services and it provides the regions with support and sparring to the successful implementation of experiments. MDI takes part in YTYÄ project in a consortium lead by Demos Helsinki. Third consortium member is Common Dialogues. MDI is responsible for the evaluation of the impact of experiments, evaluation of experimented concepts and their applicability as well as providing regions with peer support and sparring. The project is one of Government’s analysis, assessment and research activities, and it will be completed by the end of 2018.