The economic and social model of the nordic EU members: Growth, innovation and budgetary discipline despite high government spending rates

Ognian N. Hishow

No 50/2005, SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs

Abstract: At the EU summit in Hampton Court on 27 and 28 October in discussions of a suitable European economic and social model that could assure sustainable prosperity and help master the challenges of the future, repeated reference was made to the performance of the Nordic member states. Despite - or because of - the high public sector share of GDP, all three countries have achieved budget surpluses and have low levels of income inequality. Yet there is no uniform Nordic model of employment and taxation. Striking differences exist between the individual countries. Finland suffers from persistent unemployment; Denmark has the most business-friendly tax policies in the EU; and Sweden has drastically cut back its welfare state. In the meantime the reduction of the government share of GDP has become a common feature of all three countries. Although a transfer of the Nordic system to the large EU economies is not possible for structural and historical reasons, individual economy-policy elements can indeed be adopted. (SWP-Comments / SWP)

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/255983/1/2005C50.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:swpcom:502005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SWP Comments from Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), German Institute for International and Security Affairs
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().