This is an important point to understand. Scandinavian countries are 1. Small, 2. Homogenous, 3. Culturally and demographically stable, 4. Economically stable.

There are genuine differences that come with national scale that make comparisons of a small country's economy to a large country's economy impossible. It is similar to how you cannot simply scale up a mouse to the size of an elephant, since the mouse's skeletal system would collapse under its own weight. There must be qualitative adjustments to the bones to allow for such a drastic increase in size.

It is unrealistic for large countries to hold themselves to the standards of small countries, yet political and social activists do so in spite of the fundamental impossibility of comparison.