Davis Taylor is a professor of economics at College of the Atlantic. Consider an economy facing significant economic challenges. This economy, with an export-oriented history based largely on natural resource industries, faces increased global competition due to trade liberalization, along with declining long-term relative prices in its historical backbone industry, forest products. The economy is relatively small, geographically isolated, and faces challenging weather that inhibits the growing season, year-round tourism, and inmigration. The population is small, relatively dispersed, and homogenous. In many respects, this economy is in deep trouble, even as a few southern and coastal population centers are faring relatively well.

The characteristics of this economy sound similar to those of contemporary Maine. The profile, however, is drawn from Finland circa the late 1980s and early 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union, Finland’s largest trading partner, sent the Finnish economy into a tailspin. Finland was at a crossroads: its choices, to turn inward or increase its competitiveness and further open its economy to the benefits and costs of international trade.

Finland chose the latter, joining the European Union and becoming a bigger player in international trade in the high-tech and natural resource sectors. What is less known to the rest of the world is that Finland simultaneously saw the growth of thousands of new, domestically oriented, cooperatively owned businesses. The growth of Finland’s cooperative economy helped carry the country through turbulent economic times because it emphasized employment, rootedness in community, and expanded market presence, and balanced the cutthroat competition and downward pressure on wages associated with international trade…