last highlighted date: 2023-06-24
Highlights
- Sweden had an insane number of geniuses inventing all sorts of stuff in the late 1800s laying the foundation for lots of big multinational companies.
- During the interwar years, rural consumption of electricity tripled, and by 1938 around 65 per cent of rural households had been electrified. At that time, Sweden was still largely an agricultural country. Of the country’s 5.3 million inhabitants, almost 4 million lived in the countryside. Twenty years later, only 2 million of 5.5 million Swedes lived in rural areas.
- During the 2000s, state governance was clarified by Vattenfall’s articles of association. By 2005 Vattenfall was to be ‘the leading company in the transition to ecologically and economically sustainable Swedish energy supply’. But it was still to combine this requirement with its role as a profitable company.
- In fact, Sweden became a significant exporter of cereals in the 1850s. This is remarkable, since the country had been a steady net importer of grains until the 1830s.
- Exports of cereals were of tremendous importance for the industrialization process, although their origin was in the agricultural sector rather than in manufacturing, and although the era of cereal exports lasted only from the 1850s to the 1880s. One reason was that the expansion of agriculture during these three decades provided employment for the increasing population at a time when industry was not sufficiently developed to absorb enough employment. Another reason was that exports brought in large amounts of capital, which were used to finance important parts of the early industrial expansion.
- But I suspect the long Swedish experience with metal working must have been an advantage in later industrialization. Lots of important Swedish companies popped up in the 1880s and later:
- Examples of long-lived Swedish firms that were established during the late 19th century or the first years after the turn of the century are Ericsson, Alfa Laval, ASEA (today ABB), AGA, Nobel, and SKF.
- The trade unions wanted to. In 1976 the LO called for the establishment of wage-earner funds. Under the proposal, every year a proportion of a company’s profits — in the form of shares — would be transferred to union-controlled funds. After anywhere from twenty to seventy-five years, workers would control a majority of shares in most companies.
- The negative inheritance I received from my predecessor Gunnar Sträng (Minister of Finance 1955–1976) was a strongly progressive tax system with high marginal taxes. This was supposed to bring about a just and equal society. But I eventually came to the opinion that it simply didn’t work out that way he concluded. Progressive taxes created instead a society of wranglers, cheaters, peculiar manipulations, false ambitions and new injustices. It took me at least a decade to get a part of the party to see this
- However the new regime that began in the 80s has led to exceptional growth in inequality in Sweden.