Hacker News Reader

Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

Nordic countries are ridden with wellfare and are doing quite OK, I'd say. The problems Greeks and others are having are not related to wellfare.

View on HN

Also eastern/southern Europe countries are not exactly welfare countries.

Well welfare has a threshold effect. Nordic countries have very small populations to take care of. You'll see that countries where welfare becomes an issue are usually larger ones in the dozens of millions.

But I wouldn't put all the nordic countries in the same basket. Last I know Sweden is not doing too well compared to Finland.

Couldn't one simply split countries up into smaller countries, if being a small country makes things better?

Greece is a rather small country, so are Portugal and Ireland. If anything, being small makes things worse, as it is more likely that there is less economical diversification.

Greece never had an economy to begin with. It's got a free ride with the Euro cheap interest rates and now a brutal reality check when they had to pay back.

Is is not all relative? It's not like countries with "small populations to take care of" have massive populations to pay for that welfare.

I don't know the answer, but maybe you do: what percentage of the population is considered "on welfare" for those countries that are striving, versus those that aren't?

> Last I know Sweden is not doing too well compared to Finland.

I don't know if that's the case, but if so, it just might be related to Sweden having shitloads of more Somalis than Finland.

Australia, at 23 million, has one of the most liberal welfare systems in the world [1]. The economy is doing just great.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits#Australia (Everyone gets money for nothing, forever)

"Last I know Sweden is not doing too well compared to Finland."

'But from another perspective, Finland’s performance looks disappointing. An alternative destination from Helsinki on one of those monster cruise ships is due west to Stockholm. Unlike Finland, Sweden chose not to join the euro. Until the crisis, that made little difference. Both countries did well; if anything Finland’s performance was stronger. But over the past five years their fortunes have diverged to the detriment of Finland.'

http://www.economist.com/node/21560865

Reply on news.ycombinator.com