A letter from a US academic published in the FT a few days ago suggested that the Scandinavian model of the economy had features worth emulating, in particular, the greater participation by the governments in those countries. People often look to Scandinavia as a social, political and economic exemplar and argue that Scandinavian practices should be adopted elsewhere. This suggests a lack of knowledge and understanding of that part of the world, by which, presumably, they mean Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. In the first place, the four countries are very different, having had different histories. The whole region is insignificant in terms of population; to put this in perspective, there are probably nearly as many people living inside the M25. All of the countries were late to industrialise, at the end of the nineteenth century, and effectively avoided the age of coal and steam power, going direct into manufacturing of products based on electrical and internal combustion technol...
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