Switzerland is the world’s most competitive economy

Anyway, it seems like a mystery to me why tech firms like Google set up shop in small expensive Zurich instead of say cheaper, bigger Barcelona or Vienna, for example. I'd love to know what the incentives are for them.

I also wonder if the very high value of the Swiss Franc artificially inflates the number, but I wasn't able to figure this out from a cursory reading.

That's a great deal compared to most any other European country. In neighboring Germany for instance, if you earn €55k, your tax rate is about 44% (including solidarity surcharge). In Zurich it's about 11% (canton plus federal tax). The top rates are 47% and 16%, respectively.

So it's not much surprise that people want to live there, despite the high cost of living.

Also it's based on a survey responses from corporate executives. A mean name for it might be "the country popularity contest as judged by corporate fat cats". Though the survey questions do obviously direct it towards objective pastures.

Hah! The example question presented in the PR material is "In your country, to what extent is intellectual property protected?" - a poster child of where corporate executives might have a diametrically opposite view from the real makers re. what's good for the country's competitiveness.

Things are very much done according to a formula. If you're an enterprise looking for a Java developer, only a guy whose CV says "Java" will do. C# is some other planet. I think it's a Germanic thing, they expect very specific qualifications. I remember meeting a guy who had a degree as a food chemist. I asked him what jobs he was after, and he said ... food chemist.

There is a startup scene in Zurich though. The tax rate is low, and people seem to have enough savings to give it a go, at least some of the young ones. It's not a huge number of people, but the Swiss are going about it in their own way, with a number "technoparks" and such. It's somewhat cosmopolitan in its outlook; people compare themselves to other startups around the world. Reasonable pay for such small firms, too. Came across more than one 6 figure job.

Salaries are high, but stuff is expensive, too. Daycare for a kid, at a public nursery, is CHF30K a year (USD is in the ballpark of CHF). I've met a number of Swiss people who'd like to have more kids, but it's just a lot of money to pay. A quite ordinary family meal at a restaurant can be 100. Buying the food from a supermarket ain't cheap, either.

I sometimes wonder whether GDP measurement is problematic. Quality of life doesn't feel like it's all that different between various industrialized countries, but the figures suggest they are. If stuff is expensive, that makes GDP higher. So a guy eating a $1 potato is enjoying a lower quality of life than a guy who paid $2 for his. This has implications for wastage, particularly when it has to do with large organisations such as government. Burn more money, get higher GDP. Tax rate also has implications. There's probably more black market business going on in certain countries, which also contributes to general welfare. But of course that doesn't go into official accounts, or at least it's quite hard to guess how much it is. Low tax places like Switzerland are more likely to have more stuff going through official accounts.

Eh, not really. Central bank-controlled states are a reasonable grouping measure, which is why it's the US, EU, Switzerland, the UK, etc. that people compare (even though the UK is part of the EU, and Switzerland has signed on to most economic measures the EU mandates).

I'm sure some folks in Texas are itching to secede, but until that happens, we compare other countries with the US, not California, Texas, or New York.

One important way we don't compare is that healthcare and retirement costs are a massive drag on our economy. Just an hour ago I received an e-mail from my employer letting me know that their 401k matching is decreasing 1% next year, but that they're cool with it because it's still "competitive". The reality is that many Americans working today will never afford to retire. And at some point in the future they will not be able to afford their healthcare either.

How can we talk about productivity and competitiveness when we can't even afford to keep ourselves alive and healthy?

TL;DR; American competitiveness is a joke.

Otherwise one must wonder what is the point in remaining a single nation if the end result is always less happiness, education and "competitiveness".

It would be more unfair to compare separate US states with European countries. While US states share a common fate, the same can't be said about say Germany and Greece even though they are both in the EU.

States in the US vary in nominal GSP per capita by only 2x — from Mississippi at $35K to Delaware at $70K. In the EU, it ranges from Bulgaria at €6K to Ireland at €55K. (This excludes DC and Luxembourg, which are outliers in many ways.)

In fact, even Mississippi, the poorest US state, is wealthier than the EU average (€28K, about $31K)! Only the wealthiest EU countries are wealthier than Mississippi: Luxembourg, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Austria, Finland, German, Belgium, France. And of those, only Luxembourg and Ireland have a higher GDP per capita than the US average.

So the EU member states vary economically far more than the states in the US do, and the US is more easily characterized as a uniformly "high income" region than the EU is.

Mississippi's GDP per capita being similar to that of France, Italy or Spain is really hard to reconcile with the fact that many of us would love to live in the latter countries and couldn't be paid to move to Mississippi.

You shouldn't feel competitive (pun intended) about this kind of lists anyway, it's just a score on criteria some organization called "WEF" values for reasons that are their own. You don't have to 'win' every ranking, if you "win" one, you're going to lose another that uses different criteria.

Yes, there are slightly different laws and politicians, but also different infrastructure in different districts.

The are multiple political, cultural and so on levels. Countries and states inside countries often don't work the same and the hierarchical structures might be different.

Taking only EU and US already shows the huge difference. Take really banal things. The countries in the EU are also all part of the Council of Europe, which doesn't have a lot to do with the EU other than the geographic location. But they create certain rules, such as a common view against capital punishment (they actually caused that in some countries). On the other hand in the US you have very different views.

It's not easy to compare complex political, cultural structures and economic competitiveness in itself is kind of a weird thing to measure, cause there are so many layers of that term itself. Now while it is clear that this isn't meant think about all kinds of movements, be it for money less societies, be it people that want gold or resources. Describing economies can include only the monetary part, but might include goods, infrastructure, even health. And for such a report one can come up with kind of arbitrary ways of measuring things, giving them a value.

Now, I think many here know how hard it can be to measure non-complex things, how hard it can be to get the KPIs right and for how a startup those can be different and how those KPIs can change from one day to another (and that might or might not make sense).

Now comparing countries and economies is a wholly different thing.

Also I am not saying that what was done is bad or whatever. It certainly is not. I just think that people often interpret too much in those things. Taking different, equally qualified people to create such a report could result in rather big differences, because what makes sense to put in there is rather subjective and for example influenced by culture.

"Switzerland achieved its highest score of 5.8 out of 7 in the WEF Global Competitiveness Report 2016/2017"

We have a residential real estate bubble that is worse than that of the US in 2006. Median house price to median income ratios in Sydney are worse than almost anywhere but Hong Kong. We have the highest per capita private mortgage debt of any country. This represents a massive unproductive overhead on the Australian economy, as the elevated cost of shelter flows into all other costs. Tax arrangements in Australia make leveraged real estate speculation more favourable than any other kind of investment, especially productive investment with any sort of risk attached. More than 50% of the existing mortgage debt is owed overseas via the big 4 Australian banks, so we are constantly exporting what wealth we have overseas as interest, so we can sell shitty houses built in the 1960s to each other for AUD1.2 million.

Many sectors of the Australian economy are filled by a limited number of participants (e.g. banking, supermarkets, hardware, telecommunications, petrol) who are most interested in rent seeking, and not interested in competing with each other.

The Australian economy has been a net importer of capital every year since the early 1970s, an almost ever year since post WW2. If you run a current account deficit so egregiously, the result is you sell off all your productive assets to stay solvent. This also means the pool of Australian capital available to invest in Australia itself is very limited. Australia has some of the highest immigration intake in the developed world, but no long term infrastructure planning to account for such population growth. Since most immigration increases the population of the large cities, the lack of investment in transport infrastructure is most apparent. We grow the economy by increasing the captias. Per capital net disposable income has been static or falling for the last 5 years.

Politically, Australia has been without vision for real economic development outside rewarding entrenched rent seekers for the last 20 years. We have not seen any significant increases in productivity over that period.

Its from a comedy show which do shorts like this on all sorts of stereotypes, however this was the one of the most controversial ones. The US embassy even got involved in the end.

Swiss people are not very different to Americans in what they value, what hobbies they have, etc. They are much less outgoing, however. In America you can walk into a bar anywhere, at any time, sit down and have a spontaneous conversation with the barman or strangers sitting at the bar. This never happens in Switzerland. Do not expect it even if you speak good German. People in Switzerland keep to themselves. Because this makes it very hard to make friends there are a lot of "expat" events for immigrants to meet each other, and at these events you can go to a bar and start chatting to people of a similar age and background to yourself and make friends. This is how I made most of my friends: I have a few good Swiss friends, but overall most of my friends throughout my time in Switzerland were other foreigners.

Swiss people do not "fear" Americans, why would you have that idea? They do not spend a whole lot of time thinking about Americans in particular. The vast majority of people who live in the cities (and you want to be in the cities), and especially teenagers, do not own cars at all. Not only is there no need (public transport and taxis can get you everywhere) but there isn't usually enough parking and it's very expensive. People generally only buy a car once they settle down and move out of the cities.

People on the street in Switzerland tend to be well dressed and fashionable, and the women especially so. The high streets are dominated by fashion brands and shops. I can't compare this to the USA because I've only been to a few places there, but it's definitely a brand and fashion conscious place.

Some jurisdictions market slight nuances in their laws to foreigners as a perk, and other jurisdictions simply have, and if you can read you can avoid the stereotypes.