Emergic: August 14, 2004 Archives

Saturday, August 14, 2004

The Most Successful Country in the World

[via Shrikant Patil] IHT writes about Sweden:

A recent report by the United Nations showed, that if you factor in not just national income, but the longevity of its people, low infant mortality and high levels of education, Sweden is probably the most successful country in the world.

Moreover, a new study by Professor Richard Florida, of Carnegie Mellon University, which measures the kind of creativity most useful to business - talent, technology and tolerance - puts Sweden at No. 1 in Europe and ahead of the United States. In the future, Florida argues, this means that Sweden will become a "talent magnet" for the world's most purposeful workers.

General | PermaLink | Comments (3)

Actually all the Nordic countries including Sweden are facing the brain drain problem in a major way. Because of their socialist model citizens pay high income tax. Wealth get more equally distributed and government determines how to spend individual's money i.e., little economic freedom. In such atmosphere the most talented individuals are not likely to stay in the country.

Posted by Surojit

I agree with the above comment. I live and work in Sweden, and although I really enjoy the high standard of living, clean air, and the generous welfare service, I think Sweden will lose out to more dynamic countries in the future.

There is very low incentive to start a company or even get a good education. The welfare state has been kept going by high personal productivity and high taxes, but people are now "playing the system", maximising benefits that were designed to be used by a much smaller part of the population.

If you take high taxes and prices, an intrusive and basically anti-business government, long and cold winters, the impossibility of getting good housing in the big cities, Sweden is *not* a magnet for talented worker.

Posted by Gustaf Erikson

The last paragraph should read:

"f you take high taxes and prices, an intrusive and basically anti-business government, long and cold winters, the impossibility of getting good housing in the big cities into account, Sweden is *not* a magnet for talented worker."

Posted by Gustaf Erikson

Software Factories

MSDN writes: " Software Factories provide a faster, less expensive and more reliable approach to application development by significantly increasing the level of automation in application development, applying the time tested pattern of using visual languages to enable rapid assembly and configuration of framework based components. Software Factories go beyond models as documentation, using highly tuned Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as source artifacts, to capture life cycle metadata, and to support high fidelity model transformation, code generation and other forms of automation."

Software | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Tech Advantage and Business Leadership

Tim Oren writes as to why tech leadership may not result in business leadership.

Entrepreneurship | PermaLink | Comments (0)