News 1 Oct 2015

Eino H. Laurila national income medal awarded to Helvi Kinnunen, Ilmo Mäenpää and Olli Savela

The Eino H. Laurila national income medal for the year 2015 has been awarded to MSSc Helvi Kinnunen, PhD Ilmo Mäenpää and MSSc Olli Savela. The medals are granted in recognition of their active work in promoting the use of national accounts and knowledge about them.

The medals will be awarded at the Bank of Finland Museum on 1 October 2015 at 5 pm.

Senior Adviser Helvi Kinnunen has been employed long at the Bank of Finland in forecasting, monitoring and analysing tasks. Most of her work has involved the use of national accounts, financial accounts and general government statistics. She has essentially contributed to building a common information basis for the needs of macroanalysis at the Bank of Finland. She developed the financial accounting system into a quarterly basis, and in the 1990s, sector-specific financial accounts were combined as part of the Bank of Finland's model-based forecasting system. Later, she built a statistical system for government finances by means of which the balances of central and local government and social security funds have been forecast as part of the forecasting of the European System of Central Banks. The statistical system of government finances has also been incorporated into the sustainability calculation of government finances.

Research Professor Ilmo Mäenpää has successfully developed macroeconomic and regional economic models employing the input-output framework and cost-benefit analysis of national accounts. His research areas have particularly been the utilisation of natural resources and integration of environmental effects with macroeconomic analysis. Mr Mäenpää has had a key impact on the development of environmental accounts in Finland. He has mainly worked at the Thule Institute of the University of Oulu and within environmental administration.

Olli Savela, MSSc, has had a long career as an expert and developer of national accounts at Statistics Finland. In the last few decades, he has had a central role in both the reviews and production of national accounts. Mr Savela has been an active writer and has given expert comments on the use of national accounts data in public. He has also actively taken part in training new national accounts experts.

The Eino H. Laurila national income medal is awarded in recognition of noteworthy work to advance the development and application of economic descriptive systems, and promote knowledge about them. A further aim of the medal is to nurture interaction between economic research and practical work on the compilation of statistics. Decisions about awarding of the medal are made by the Ekonomiska Samfundet i Finland, the Finnish Statistical Society, the Finnish Economic Association, Statistics Finland, and the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation. The first medal was awarded to Professor Eino H. Laurila in 1993 for his extensive work on the development of Finnish national accounts.

Further information:
Ari Tyrkkö, Head, Co-ordination and International Activities, Statistics Finland, +358 29 551 3261; email: firstname.lastname@stat.fi

Bank of Finland Museum