Denmark is a small country. Most Australians, at least, would probably only know about Denmark because of Hans Christian Anderson and latterly, Princess Mary. It just seems to be a small country up there in northern Europe, freezing cold in winter and not on the usual tourist path! Wrong! It's a country, small though it may be, that can teach the US and Australia a lot - as a survey has revealed and as discussed by Adele Horin in a piece in the SMH:
"Imagine this: a country where virtually all workers belong to a union. They are covered by collective agreements, not individual contracts. They have high minimum wages and generous welfare benefits. Government spending and taxes are also high. Such a country would be an economic basket case, no? It would be uncompetitive, lack dynamism, and suffer high unemployment.
That is what 11 years of the Howard Government has taught us to expect, and Rudd Labor is not inclined to disagree. In the me-tooism that has afflicted Australian politics, it seems everyone is an economic conservative.
But just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so there is more than one way to produce a dynamic economy.
Denmark should be a basket case, our Princess Mary's presence notwithstanding. It is burdened by the full catastrophe: unions, welfare and taxes. Instead it is the fourth most competitive economy in the world as ranked by the World Economic Forum. It is beaten only by those well-known examples of rapacious capitalism, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden, and is ahead of the US, ranked at No. 6. In this survey of global competitiveness based on hard data and a survey of 11,000 business leaders, Australia is ranked a respectable 19 out of 125, marked down for its failure to move "beyond simply using technology developed elsewhere".
Denmark exports expensive, high-quality products. It has had years of low unemployment, low inflation, respectable growth and productivity rates. In all these measures it rivals the US, and also runs a budget surplus. Its GDP per capita is a few thousand dollars less than in the US but its workers put in shorter hours and yet are among the world's most prosperous. It runs a very open economy, is highly dependent on trade, and has had trade surpluses for 20 years.
Putting workers on individual contracts and crushing the unions is not, it seems, a necessary pre-condition of economic success. Denmark shows there is not one true path to a thriving economy, as the authors of a new study comparing Denmark with the US reveal. The US has achieved impressive results and so, too, has Denmark. But Denmark has gone one step further. It has achieved economic success with much less income inequality and poverty than the US. Less than 10 per cent of Danes in 2002 were considered to be living in poverty compared with 17 per cent of Americans."
"Imagine this: a country where virtually all workers belong to a union. They are covered by collective agreements, not individual contracts. They have high minimum wages and generous welfare benefits. Government spending and taxes are also high. Such a country would be an economic basket case, no? It would be uncompetitive, lack dynamism, and suffer high unemployment.
That is what 11 years of the Howard Government has taught us to expect, and Rudd Labor is not inclined to disagree. In the me-tooism that has afflicted Australian politics, it seems everyone is an economic conservative.
But just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so there is more than one way to produce a dynamic economy.
Denmark should be a basket case, our Princess Mary's presence notwithstanding. It is burdened by the full catastrophe: unions, welfare and taxes. Instead it is the fourth most competitive economy in the world as ranked by the World Economic Forum. It is beaten only by those well-known examples of rapacious capitalism, Switzerland, Finland and Sweden, and is ahead of the US, ranked at No. 6. In this survey of global competitiveness based on hard data and a survey of 11,000 business leaders, Australia is ranked a respectable 19 out of 125, marked down for its failure to move "beyond simply using technology developed elsewhere".
Denmark exports expensive, high-quality products. It has had years of low unemployment, low inflation, respectable growth and productivity rates. In all these measures it rivals the US, and also runs a budget surplus. Its GDP per capita is a few thousand dollars less than in the US but its workers put in shorter hours and yet are among the world's most prosperous. It runs a very open economy, is highly dependent on trade, and has had trade surpluses for 20 years.
Putting workers on individual contracts and crushing the unions is not, it seems, a necessary pre-condition of economic success. Denmark shows there is not one true path to a thriving economy, as the authors of a new study comparing Denmark with the US reveal. The US has achieved impressive results and so, too, has Denmark. But Denmark has gone one step further. It has achieved economic success with much less income inequality and poverty than the US. Less than 10 per cent of Danes in 2002 were considered to be living in poverty compared with 17 per cent of Americans."
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