Reference Budgets as Tools for Everyday Life, Evaluation and Policy Making in Finland

Abstract

This chapter tackles Anna-Riitta Lehtinen and Kristiina Aalto's work on reference budget methods in Finland in order to establish the decent minimum reference budgets. It illustrates some attempts that were made to establish a programme of reference budget research in the 1990s. It also mentions how reference budget research was revived by Lehtinen and Aalto's work on consensual budgets in 2010 and then in 2018. The chapter examines how the Finnish reference budgets combine focus group discussions with members of the public in order to help improve the reliability and validity of the resulting standards. It reveals the inadequacy of the Finnish social protection system, in which only pensioner incomes reached the reference budget standard while other cash transfers and benefits were about 70 percent of the reference budgets.