2 – The Scandinavian Model

One thing is for sure, the Scandinavian Model did work out very well for all the Nordic Countries. They all rank among the most prosperous countries in the OECD, run their economies better than any big nation and rank among the best when it comes to the Human Development.

The Prosperity Index 2013 (link) of the London based Legatum Institute ranks Norway (1), Sweden (4), Denmark (6), Finland (8) and Iceland (13) higher than the UK (16).

The key element of the Scandinavian Model was not the Welfare State, it was the Personal Freedom in combination with Competition and Globalisation. Farmers own their farmland, workers are to a high degree, in average some 70%, organised in strong unions (link) and early on women got their rights: to vote, to divorce, to education, to employment.

The Nordic welfare state is providing for the essentials for people to be able to educate and work in progressive, private companies or public services. Not just to be nice. In the Forbes list of the 2000 biggest privately owned companies in the world (link), some 101 companies are UK based, while 58 are from the Nordic countries. That is more private, capitalist success in Scandinavia than in Britain if you take the home market size into account.

Three of these five Scandinavian countries have gained their full independence in the past 110 years only: Norway in 1905, Finland in 1917 and Iceland as late as 1944. Norway denouncing the union with a prosperous Sweden. At the time of their independence, these countries where probably some of the poorest countries in Europe and Sweden one of the richer ones, thanks to its early industrialisation. Around 1900 the GDP per capita in Norway was only some 70% of that of Sweden.

Thanks to Oil & Gas plus Independece, today it’s pretty much vice versa. If Norway still was a part of Sweden as from 1814 onwards and Stockholm the capital, do you think the oil revenues and wealth still would have made Norway the number one in the Human Development Index?

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