SCANDINAVIA\\\


Clean air and clean balance sheets


Clean air, clean-living people loads of lakes, trees – and taxes. That is the popular image of Scandinavia outside the Nordic region; most lay people don’t make much distinction between


the three


major Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, or Finland for that matter. The popular outsider’s image of


Scandinavia is of ‘socialism with smorgasbords’ – places in which the state spends lavishly on a whole range of social and welfare programmes, but in which people were so wealthy that they could pay up to 70% of their income in taxes and not notice much.


Scandinavia was seen throughout the 1970s and 80s as a beacon by the European leſt, an example of how socialism of a sort could work at a time when the Soviet Union was becoming increasingly brutal and broken down. US conservatives meanwhile spoke darkly of the perils of ‘Swedenisation’. Actually, what has happened in


all the Scandinavian countries is that the size of the state sector, and government debt, has been quietly managed down, to the point where the Government’s share of GDP is lower than in most European countries


and budget deficits


are minimal – or even surpluses in some cases. There has been a lot of privatisation, exemplified by the colourful coaches of the private bus companies streaming down the motorway from Stockholm. Schools and hospitals are partly private, partly public. Manufacturing industry was always private, and unprofitable concerns have also been allowed to go to the wall, like car-maker Saab. Once notorious labour laws


that allegedly made it virtually impossible for employers to sack even the most recalcitrant and incompetent workers have been


rolled back and more flexibility has been introduced. These reforms have gone


largely unremarked in the rest of Europe, partly because Scandinavia is a long way away and most people without business or personal ties pay little attention to the region. But it’s also because of Scandinavian pragmatism: the reforms have been carried out without the public posturing by parties of either leſt or right; it was seen as a necessary thing to do and the politicians just got on with it. Many commentators feel that


the Scandinavians have managed to get the balance right, slimming


down big government while preserving the best aspects of the welfare state. Some still fret about the size of the welfare bill; some of the discussions about welfare scroungers wouldn’t be out of place in the Daily Mail. And more lately there are


signs that the region’s relatively strong economic growth of recent years is just beginning to tail off. Strong currencies – none of the Scandinavian trio are in the Euro, only Finland – are currently making life hard for exporters of more basic products like steel and timber. This is less of an issue at the high tech and knowledge ends of


the economy, of course. From a freight point of view, the


high volume nature of Sweden’s forestry and forest product industries in particular always ensured that southbound flows into Britain comfortably outpaced northbound traffic – but that was before the Scandinavians discovered the merits of burning biomass. Now the trade imbalance is all the other way, as the UK exports vast quantities of RDF as it is euphemistically termed - refuse-derived fuel. Much of this trade goes in bulk ships, of course, but returning road trailers are also pressed into service.


Issue 8 2013 - Freight Business Journal


25


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