The barriers to the international mobility of goods, factors and ideas have been steadily falling. This is fostering the creation of a global market for goods, factors and ideas. The central questions addressed in this paper are whether and how these globalization phenomena can be expected to change the geographical distribution of economic activities in the case of Finland.The foregoing questions are tackled from the specific point of view of "new economic geography", an approach to economic geography firmly grounded on recent developments in mainstream industrial organization and international trade theory. The theoretical predictions of new economic geography are critically assessed in the case of Finland by investigating the forces that have driven regional economic performance during the last decades.