From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Sep 19 2002 - 01:23:42 MDT
On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 05:49:16PM -0700, Damien Sullivan wrote:
> Article on rules tripping up businesses in Europe. The odd thing is that the
> most friendly countries are claimed to be Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and
> Britain, with Spain, Italy and Greece at the bottom. Odd because Sweden has
> rather a different reputation here.
In a sense, Sweden is a great place to run a business. But it is
an awful place to *start* a business. The system is geared to
help big companies that can afford to have a staff of lawyers and
auditors implementing the around 25,000 rules that govern Swedish
business. The social democrats who have run things forever have a
very clear tendency to favor big centralized business (think
Ericsson and Volvo), since that is the kind of structure they
ideologically could deal with and where the unions were most
powerful. Entrepeneurs and startups were (and are still to a
large extent) regarded as irrelevant, strange and a bit suspect
by the system.
One reason Sweden isn't doing very well these days is simply that
the big companies that earned the most are going international (or
not doing very well), and there is rather few new up-and-coming
companies to replace them.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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