World's youngest PM takes office in Finland

Yahoo – AFP, December 10, 2019

Sanna Marin is Finland's youngest ever leader (AFP Photo/Heikki Saukkomaa)

Helsinki (AFP) - Finland's Sanna Marin, 34, was officially appointed as the country's prime minister on Tuesday, becoming the world's youngest sitting head of government.

The former transport minister takes the helm of a coalition of five parties that will all be led by women, once the prime minister takes over as head of her Social Democratic party next year. All but one of the female coalition leaders are aged under 35.

Marin became Finland's third female prime minister after her nomination was passed in parliament by 99 votes to 70 Tuesday and President Sauli Niinisto officially appointed the new centre-left cabinet.

She succeeds Antti Rinne, who resigned last week after losing the trust of one of his coalition parties over his handling of a postal strike.

Marin has made global headlines for becoming not only Finland's youngest ever leader, but also the world's youngest sitting head of government, ahead of Ukraine's Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk who is currently 35.

Marin (C) was sworn in with her centre-left cabinet (AFP Photo/Vesa Moilanen)

But on Tuesday, Marin deflected questions about the international attention she has received over becoming the world's youngest premier.

"My own thoughts have been on practical things and this week, I haven't followed what the press have been writing very much either at home or abroad," she told reporters outside parliament.

Earlier this week she said: "I have never thought about my age or gender, I think of the reasons I got into politics and those things for which we have won the trust of the electorate."

Marin grew up looked after by her mother and her mother's girlfriend, and said that her "rainbow family" showed her the importance of "equality, fairness and human rights".

In a 2015 interview, Marin said she felt 'invisible' as a child, because she could not speak openly about her family setup.

The world's youngest political leaders after Finland's Sanna Marin become the 

world's youngest sitting prime minister on Tuesday. (AFP Photo/Jonathan WALTER)

She has also said that her childhood has strongly influenced her political priorities, which include protecting Finland's generous welfare system and low levels of inequality.

"I come from a poor family and would not have been able to succeed and move forward were it not for the strong welfare state and the Finnish education system," she told Helsingin Sanomat.

The Social Democrats took office in June after defeating the far-right, anti-immigration Finns Party by the narrowest of margins in April's general election.

The victory was seen by some commentators as a triumph for Finland's liberal, equal society over a party that ran on a ticket of cutting asylum levels almost to zero and halting anti-climate change measures.

Speaking after Tuesday's parliamentary vote, Marin pledged to rebuild trust in her party.

"We have promised the Finnish people change and now we must deliver on that promise. In June we agreed a government programme together and I believe it is through actions that we will best restore people's trust," she said.

No new jobs but happier citizens in Finland's basic income test

Yahoo – AFP, Sam KINGSLEY, 8 February 2019

It didn't generate any jobs, but Finland's universal basic income experiment still
yielded valuable insights

A groundbreaking trial providing a guaranteed basic monthly income to 2,000 jobless people has led to improved wellbeing but failed to boost employment, Finnish authorities announced on Friday.

Last December the Nordic nation concluded a two-year experiment in which a randomly selected group of unemployed people were paid an unconditional, tax-free 560 euros ($634) a month.

Researchers studied whether the no-strings-attached income could better incentivise jobless people to find work than traditional unemployment benefits, which may be docked as soon as the recipient starts earning money.

Although the widest such study to be conducted in recent years in Europe, the Finnish trial was limited to participants who were already unemployed.

Proponents of a true "universal income" call for a monthly payent, sometimes described as a citizens' wage, to be given to everyone regardless of their wealth, family or work situation.

Nevertheless Finnish researchers believe their findings provide important insights for reforming the country's system of welfare payments.

"The recipients of a basic income had less stress symptoms as well as less difficulties to concentrate and less health problems than the control group," Minna Ylikanno, lead researcher at Finland's welfare authority Kela, said in a statement.

"They were also more confident in their future and in their ability to influence societal issues," she added.

Results at this stage are preliminary and relate only to the first year of the study, meaning Friday's findings are far from conclusive.

But a hoped-for stiumulus to levels of employment has not yet materialised, the project's researchers said.

"The recipients of a basic income were no better or worse than the control group at finding employment in the open labour market", Ohto Kanninen, research coordinator at the Labour Institute for Economic Research, said in a statement.

Finland's social affairs minister, Pirkko Mattila, conceded on Friday that the government has no plans to roll out the scheme across the whole country.

"Even though the basic income model developed for the experiment is not likely to be adopted as such for more extensive use, I think the experiment was very successful," Mattila said in a statement.

"We can use the data from the experiment to redesign our social security system; that is going to be the next major reform.”

Similar schemes have been trialled in Canada and Kenya.

The experiment has not been without its detractors. Finnish trade unions have called instead for employers to pay living wages that do not need to be subsidised by benefits.

The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has claimed that a basic income programme in Finland would not be economically viable and could leave significant numbers of people in worse poverty than now.

In 2017, Swiss voters rejected a proposed universal income in a referendum after critics slammed the idea as rewarding the lazy and the feckless.

Estonia 'e-residency' offers Brexit Brits EU loophole

Yahoo – AFP, Mike COLLIER with Mary SIBIERSKI in Warsaw, August 13, 2017

Taavi Kotka, Estonia's chief information officer, presents the e-residency IDs
project. As Brits brace for the upheaval that Brexit could bring, some are turning to
Estonia's e-residency digital ID programme to keep doing business across
the EU. (AFP Photo/RAIGO PAJULA)

Tallinn (AFP) - As Brits brace for the upheaval that Brexit could bring, some are turning to Estonia's e-residency digital ID programme to keep doing business across the European Union.

Using its knack for digital innovation to capitalise on the global explosion in e-commerce, the small cyber-savvy Baltic eurozone state became the first country to offer e-residency identification cards to people worldwide in 2014.

Touted as a "trans-national government-issued digital identity", e-residency allows users to open a business in the EU and then run it remotely with the ability to declare taxes and sign documents digitally.

It does not provide citizenship, tax residency, physical residency or the right to travel to Estonia. Applications can be made online via the www.howtostayin.eu website and cost 100 euros ($112).

Just over 22,000 people from 138 countries across the globe have become e-residents so far, including around 1,200 Brits and last year's Brexit vote triggered a boom in applications from the UK.

Before it, only three British citizens applied per week, but that shot up to over 50 in its aftermath. There was also a 75 percent spike in UK traffic on the website after Prime Minister Theresa May triggered the Article 50 EU exit clause in March.

A "soft Brexit" would mean that Britain could retain access to the European single market like non-EU member Norway. But the "hard Brexit" option that has prevailed so far would see Britain leave the European single market and the customs union, creating a nightmare scenario for UK businesses as there would no longer be free movement of goods and services.

"The UK may have chosen to leave the EU, but its entrepreneurs can still choose to remain inside the EU's business environment" through e-residency, programme director Kaspar Korjus told AFP.

E-residency spokesman Arnaud Castaignet explaind that if a British entrepreneur becomes an Estonian e-resident and establishes a company producing goods in Estonia then they "will have the same access to the EU market as any EU company."

So far the majority of companies established by e-residents are in consultancy services, IT programming, web developing, business support services.

'Insurance policy'

Winners of the Mayor of London's 2017 Entrepreneur competition say they signed up for e-residency to mitigate the risk Brexit poses for their business, a startup making environmentally-friendly wet wipes.

Ellenor McIntosh and Alborz Bozorgi both live in London but say they took up e-residency in order to be able to keep their company, Twipes, inside the EU's single market.

Billing Twipes as "the future of toilet paper", its owners say they have registered it both in the UK and Estonia to boost investor confidence.

"We had discussions with many investors from across Europe, Cyprus and Estonia in particular, and they view the uncertainty of Brexit as a huge risk," Bozorgi told AFP via email.

"We had to incorporate in both the UK and EU as a method of hedging risk," he added.

If Britain loses access to the single market, however, the company would need to source materials and produce Twipes inside the EU to keep duty free access to the bloc.

Brit Dirk Singer established his Rabbit digital marketing agency six years ago in the UK, but wary of Brexit he digitally relocated it to Estonia last year thanks to e-residency.

"I applied for e-residency shortly before the EU referendum last year. Essentially, I was not so optimistic that we would vote to stay and so I saw this as an insurance policy," Singer told AFP.

"Two of my five biggest clients are from the EU. I'm concerned that as a small UK service-based business, Brexit could start to make life difficult for me."

British writer Will Mawhood who runs the "Deep Baltic" culture website says he jumped at the opportunities and flexibility e-residency offers, especially having his company registered in a eurozone member.

"I split my time between the UK and Latvia, but since all my work is online, I often spend prolonged periods of time in other countries," he told AFP.

"People involved in my company are based in a variety of countries, so having to sign important documents in person would be unnecessarily time-consuming and complicated," he added.

Digital banking

An upgrade to the e-residency programme in May saw Finnish fintech company Holvi team up with Estonia to launch , eliminating the need for e-residents to travel to take care of business banking.

Korjus told AFP that there are signs that this uniquely Estonian digital innovation is catching on abroad.

"We've had interest from governments around the world who are keen to understand the programme and even introduce their own versions of e-residency."

He insists that safeguards are in place to prevent the programme from being abused for tax evasion or money laundering, including police checks of applicants.

Economics Nobelist Holmstrom: CEO pay 'just a mess'

Yahoo – AFP,  October 10, 2016

Bengt Holmstrom, the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his research hasn't always
gotten through to those who design pay packages (AFP Photo/Kayana
Szymczak)

Washington (AFP) - Bengt Holmstrom, the Finnish economist whose contract theory research earned him a Nobel economics prize Monday, said that executive compensation has gotten out of hand, and contributed to the collapse of Enron Corp.

Holmstrom, who shared the Nobel with fellow economist Oliver Hart, explored the way employment contracts can shape behavior and reach mutually beneficial outcomes for the hirer and hiree.

But he told an audience Monday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he now works, that their research hasn't always gotten through to those who design pay packages.

"I was on the Nokia board for two or three years. And I think executive compensation went from reasonable to absolutely dreadful," he said, pointing to stock and option incentives given management.

Likewise, he said, the collapse of Enron, the high-flying energy company that failed in 2001, related to executives' pay deals, with generous stock options, that did not align their interests with the company's.

"I think the main problem with that scheme was that they were not vested, that executives could cash out very quickly," he said.

He told journalists that executive pay had gotten too complicated. "There's so many pieces of it and it's just a mess... I wish they would listen a little bit more about what we know or understand about executive compensation."

Holmstrom, 67, said he was delighted to receive the Nobel. He and Hart will share the eight million kronor ($924,000) prize.

"I feel dazed.... I am still wondering whether I will wake up or not."

He described himself as "lucky" for having gotten into a research topic just at the time it was garnering broader interest, "for being in the right place at the right time."

But he was not ready to offer a prescription on how pay should be decided, saying it is difficult to fiddle with the power of the market.

"Economics doesn't really have an opinion on the level" of pay, or why CEO pay has soared in recent years, he noted. "It is what it is. It is somehow demand and supply working its magic."

After years of working on theoretical topics, Holmstrom said he was now thinking about real-world issues.

"In the last six years, since the financial crisis, have been intellectually very rewarding."

"I'm back into the mode of really thinking about problems, which you can lie in bed and wake up at night and feel excited about."

Finland to test out basic income scheme

Yahoo – AFP, August 25, 2016

Finland's government will test an unconditional basic income amid a growing
debate on the subject in Europe (AFP Photo/Miguel Medina)

Helsinki (AFP) - Switzerland may have voted against the controversial idea of paying all its citizens a guaranteed income, but Finland indicated Thursday it plans to try out a monthly basic payment of 560 euros ($600).

The government said it had chosen the figure for an unconditional basic income in line with a manifesto pledge by centrist Prime Minister Juha Sipila, who took office 15 months ago.

Former businessman Sipila wants to see if the measure can boost employment and simplify the welfare benefits system, and plans to test the idea on a 2,000-strong sample of randomly selected working-age residents.

"The primary goal of the basic income experiment is related to promoting employment," said the health and social affairs ministry, adding that it also aimed to simplify the complicated benefits system in a sustainable way regarding public finances.

Amid a growing debate on the subject, Finland now wants to be the first European country to test the idea nationwide.

In June, voters in Switzerland decisively rejected a far more generous proposal to pay a monthly 2,500 Swiss francs (2,300 euros/$2,500) to each adult and 625 francs for each child.

The idea has support on the political left and right with the former wanting a guaranteed safety net while some liberal voices feel that money for nothing can dissuade some jobless people from seeking work.

Related Article:

Swiss say 'no thanks' to basic income for all

European Parliament backs Juncker's refugee plans

European lawmakers have backed European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker's proposals for coping with a massive influx of migrants. The vast majority of the people on the move have been heading for Germany.

Deutsche Welle, 10 Sep 2015

Members of the European Parliament meeting in Strasbourg on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to support Juncker's proposals, with 432 voting in favor of the non-binding resolution and just 142 against, with 57 abstentions.

A statement posted on the European Parliament's website said the lawmakers backed the Commission's proposal to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers from Italy, Greece and Hungary. This came a day after it backed an emergency proposal for relocating 40,000 asylum seekers.

It also said that a majority of lawmakers believed that the bloc's "Dublin rules," which determine in which member state any given migrant is required to register, should be amended through a "fair, compulsory allocation key" taking into account "the integration prospects and the specific cases and needs of asylum seekers themselves."

The MEPs also expressed support for the idea of drawing up a common EU list of safe countries of origin and a compulsory resettlement plan under which members states would be required to take in refugees from third countries.

As #refugeecrisis intensifies, #migrationEU becomes a common challenge. Learn more http://t.co/UE1bqUyRc6 pic.twitter.com/EdiaGYX3Vl

— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) 10 september 2015

More important than the consensus in Strasbourg though, is how the bloc's 28 national governments react to Juncker's proposals.

EU interior ministers are to meet on Monday to discuss the proposals and several eastern members of the bloc have already expressed their opposition to a compulsory resettlement plan.

The MEPs also called on the EU's foreign policy coordinator, Federica Mogherini to convene an international conference on refugees "with the aim of establishing a common global humanitarian aid strategy." They said that in addition to EU officials, it should include representatives from all of its member states, United Nations agencies, non-governmental agencies, the United States and Arab countries.

The European Union is experiencing an influx of migrants from the south that is unprecedented in the history of the bloc. While Germany alone is expecting to receive around 800,000 migrants by the end of 2015, some European countries have said they are determined to take in as few as possible. While many of the migrants have come from war zones such as Syria, many have also come from the western Balkans, where no major conflict currently exists.

pfd/kms (AFP, AP)

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"Return of the Masters" - Apr 11-12, 2015 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll)

Finnish PM: Refugees welcome in spare home

Finland's prime minister has reacted to Europe's migrant crisis by offering his spare home to refugees. Juha Sipila said everyone in Europe should ask themselves what they can do to help asylum seekers.

Deutsche Welle, 6 Sep 2015

Sipila told Finnish television on Saturday that he and his wife had decided to make the house in central Finland available from January. The house has been empty since the family moved to Helsinki.

Sipila's offer is likely to cause tensions within his center-right governing coalition which comprises his own Center Party, the pro-EU conservatives and the populist, euroskeptic Finns Party, given rising unemployment and recession.

The Finns Party is the second largest in Finland, with a policy of wanting tougher immigration laws, although it has distanced itself from Europe's far-right parties.

The Sipila's spare home is in Kempele, a central Finnish town of 17,000. Details about the size of the house and how to apply were not immediately available.

Sipila, a former telecoms executive, made the offer on Finnish MTV television following complaints over the opening of refugee centers in towns across the sparsely populated Nordic nation.

"I ask everybody to stop all hate speech and concentrate on taking care of people that are fleeing from war zones, so that they feel safe and welcome here in Finland," Sipila said.

'Genuine welcome'

"We all should think what we can do ourselves," he said. "The more citizen activity we can find to [resolve] this matter, the better."

An asylum seeker "deserves a human treatment and genuine welcome greeting from us Finns," he added.

On Friday, Sipila's government doubled its refugee arrivals estimate for this year up to 30,000. Last year, 3,600 sought asylum in Finland.

The Sipilas have another house near Helsinki as well as use of a government residence.

 Israel Wahlen Isaac Herzog

"Jews cannot be indifferent," said Herzog

Offer safe haven: Israeli opposition leader

In parallel initiative, Israel's opposition leader Isaac Herzog said Israel should take in Syrian asylum seekers.

"Jews cannot be indifferent while hundreds of thousands of refugees are seeking a safe haven," he told the "Haaretz" newspaper.

"I call on the government of Israel to act towards absorbing refugees from the fighting in Syria, on top of the humanitarian steps that are already being done," he added.

Herzog leads the Labour party, the largest opposition bloc in parliament.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has urged Israel to allow Palestinian refugees fleeing the war in Syria to travel to the West Bank and Gaza for shelter, instead of making the risky passage to Europe, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA.

Abbas was apparently referring to Palestinian refugees whose families were expelled when Israel was founded in 1948 and who have left Syria since the outbreak of its civil war in 2011.

Israel has treated many wounded from the Syrian civil war raging next door but has so far stopped short of opening its border to citizens of its longtime enemy.

This year, Israel's military has carried out a number of raids and airstrikes on suspected Hezbollah sites and Syrian army targets on the Syrian side the Golan Heights after rockets were fired at Israel's Galilee region.

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometers (460 square miles) of the Golan plateau from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it 14 years later. That move has never been recognized by the international community.

ipj/cmk (AP, Reuters, AFP)

Palestinians in Gaza City put flowers on a sand sculpture of Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, a symbol of the migrant crisis pic.twitter.com/a8XBTW4eLW

— Agence France-Presse (@AFP) 8 september 2015

Switzerland comes out on top in World Happiness Report

Switzerland has knocked Denmark off its perch as the happiest country in the world. That's according to the 2015 World Happiness Report, which seeks to quantify happiness as a means of influencing governmental policy.

Deutsche Welle, 24 April 2015

The third annual World Happiness Report put Switzerland at the top of the list, followed closely by Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Canada. Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia rounded out the top 10 for 2015.

Germany was placed 26th of the 160 countries studied, not far behind Britain, which placed 21st, and the United States, which did a little better at 15th.

Among the lowest on the list were war-torn Syria and Afghanistan, which were among the bottom 10, along with eight sub-Saharan African countries.

The rankings were based on a number of factors, including real gross domestic product per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support systems and the perceived degree of corruption or lack thereof in government.

Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in the United States, which led the study on behalf of the United Nations, told a press conference in New York on Thursday that the top 13 countries were the same as in last year's report, although their order had shifted.

Sachs, who was one of the authors of the report, said the winning formula for all 13 was relative affluence combined with strong social support networks and relatively accountable systems of government.

"Countries below that top group fall short, either in income or in social support or in both," he said.

Sachs said the report would be widely distributed at the United Nations and that he expected that it would be carefully read by governments all over the world.

"We want this to have an impact, to put it straightforwardly, on the deliberations on sustainable development because we think this really matters," he said.

'Networks that connect people'

Another co-author of the report, John Helliwell of the University of British Columbia, told the CBC, Canada's public broadcaster, that although affluence played a major role in happiness, "the importance of social factors and the norms and networks that connect people" was a theme that cut through all levels of income.

This, he said, included "everything from the degree of trust and collaboration in the workplace to time spent with family and friends, for example."

The other co-author, Richard Layard from the London School of Economics, stressed the importance of an individual's childhood to how happy they could be expected to be in their adult lives.

"We must invest early on in the lives of our children so that they grow to become independent, productive and happy adults, contributing both socially and economically," he said.

pfd/bk (AFP, dpa)

Related Article:

The Netherlands falls three places in happiest countries report

How digital is Europe? New EU Commission index ranks countries based on ‘digital performance’ (spoiler: Denmark wins)

As it prepares to present its strategy for a EU-wide ‘Digital Single Market’, the European Commission today released (a new index), ranking all 28 EU member states based on their digital performance.

Tech.eu, RobinWauters, 24 February 2015

Today at the well-attended #Digital4EU stakeholder forum in Brussels, the European Commission has announced a new Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI). The index aims to highlight how digital Europe’s 28 member states really are, and to demonstrate that borders – and I quote – “remain an obstacle to a fully-fledged Digital Single Market – one of the top priorities of the Juncker Commission”.

The new tool, presented today at the event, provides per-country snapshots of connectivity (how widespread, fast and affordable broadband is), Internet skills, the use of online activities from news to shopping, and how key digital technologies (e-invoices, cloud services, e-commerce, etc) and digital public services such as e-government and e-health are developed across Europe.

The data is mostly from 2013 and 2014 and essentially aims to provide an overview of how digital Europe is. You can argue that the best you can do for this is glorified guesswork, but FYI the DESI combines more than 30 indicators and uses a weighting system to rank each country based on its digital performance.

To calculate a member state’s overall score, each set and subset of indicators were given a specific weighting by European Commission experts. Connectivity and digital skills each contribute 25% to the total score. Integration of digital technology accounts for 20%, while online activities (‘use of Internet’) and digital public services each contribute 15%.

As you can see above, right at the top is Denmark, with a 0.68 digital performance score out of 1, but really Nordic countries are – perhaps unsurprisingly – scoring well across the board; Sweden and Finland are also in the top 5 alongside Belgium and The Netherlands.

Not so high on the European ‘digital performance’ leaderboard are countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Croatia and Italy.

Some other findings from the Index, which overall combines more than 30 indicators:

– A majority of Europeans use the Internet on a regular basis: 75% in 2014 (compared to 72% in 2013), ranging from 93% in Luxembourg to a meager 48% in Romania

– Europeans are apparently very eager to access audiovisual content online: 49% of Europeans who go online have played or downloaded games, images, films or music. 39% of households that have a TV watch video on demand

– Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) face barriers with e-commerce: only 15% of SMEs sell online – and of that 15%, fewer than half do so across borders

– Digital public services are an everyday reality in some countries but almost non-existent in others: 33% of European Internet users have used online forms to send information to public authorities, ranging from 69% in Denmark to only 6% in Romania

– 26% of general practitioners in Europe use e-prescriptions to transfer prescriptions to pharmacists over the Internet, but this varies from 100% in Estonia to 0% in Malta

The European Commission is currently preparing its Digital Single Market strategy, which will be presented in May. (By the way, to make sure startups’ voices are heard as the plans take shape, check out this survey we’ve put together in collaboration with Nesta and the European Digital Forum).

If you’re interested in digging in: the DESI dataset is available here.

(Featured image credit: buffaloboy2513 / Shutterstock)

Related Article:

African nations face dilemma over digital switch

Nordic welfare state being cut down to size

Google – AFP, Soeren Billing (AFP), 21 January 2014

Stockholm's old town rooftops are pictured from the Riddarholmen island in

Sweden's capital, on November 10, 2012 (AFP/File, Jonathan Nackstrand)

Copenhagen — The Nordic model, known for high taxes and its cradle-to-grave welfare system, is getting a radical makeover as nations find themselves cash-strapped.

During the post-war period, the Scandinavian economies became famous for a "softer" version of capitalism that placed more importance on social equality than other western nations, such as Britain and the United States, did.

But globalisation, economic necessity and an ideological shift to the right has led to a scaling back of the public sector.

Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-

Schmidt arrives for an EU summit, in

 Brussels, on December 20, 2013 (AFP/

File, Lionel Bonaventure)

In Sweden, visitors are sometimes surprised to learn about year-long waiting times for cancer patients, rioting in low-income suburbs and train derailments amid lagging infrastructure investment.

"The generosity of the system has declined," said Jonas Hinnfors, a professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg.

"Much of this already started changing in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s," he added.

In the wake of a banking crisis in the early nineties, Stockholm scrapped housing subsidies, reformed the pension system and slashed the healthcare budget.

A voucher-based system that allows for-profit schools to compete with state schools was introduced, and has drawn attention from right-wing politicians elsewhere, including Britain's Conservative Party.

In 2006, conservative Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's government accelerated the pace of reform, tightening the criteria for unemployment benefits and sick pay while lowering taxes.

Income tax in Sweden is now lower than in France, Belgium and Denmark, and public spending as a share of GDP has declined from a record 71.0 percent in 1993 to 53.3 percent last year.

Once the darling of progressives, Sweden has become a model for free-market-leaning thinkers including British weekly The Economist, which last year hailed the scaled-down Nordic model as "the next supermodel."

"They offer a blueprint of how to reform the public sector, making the state far more efficient," it wrote.

This month, the Wall Street Journal praised tax cuts and entitlement reforms in Sweden and Denmark that "are now discomfiting their big-government admirers overseas."

Although polls show strong support among Swedes for the income tax cuts of the past few years, the leftist opposition looks set to win this year's general election.

The Social Democrats, in power for much of last century, have been boosted by a string of scandals in private elderly care homes involving degrading treatment of their residents, and by plummeting school results in international rankings.

However, it's unclear how they will finance an improvement of public services, having already pledged to keep the popular income tax cuts.

If Sweden is the Nordic country to have gone the furthest in shrinking its welfare state, Denmark has moved the fastest.

Timber, transported by railway, seen

 at a train station in Niirala, eastern

 Finland, on July 17, 2008 (Lehtikuva/

AFP/File, Roni Rekomaa)

When her Social Democratic government took power in 2011, there was little to suggest Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt would make any dramatic changes to the country's cherished welfare state -- funded by the world's highest tax burden.

After a centre-right government had raised the retirement age and reduced the unemployment benefits period from four to two years, "Gucci Helle" -- as she is known among her detractors -- went on to cut corporate taxes to 22 percent from 25 percent.

Other reforms have included requiring young people on benefits to undertake training, and withdrawing student aid to those taking too long to finish their studies.

It has left her deeply unpopular in some quarters. At last year's May Day speeches she was met by jeers as audience members sprayed her with a water pistol, threw tomatoes at her, and even flashed their buttocks.

For some of Thorning-Schmidt's allies -- notably the leftist Red Green Alliance -- the reforms have been too much to stomach, and in November her minority government had to seek support from the main opposition parties to pass this year's budget.

Denmark has been spurred into action by a persistently sluggish economy since a housing bubble imploded in 2007, leading to anaemic household spending.

But among Danes there is also a sense that the welfare state was ballooning out of control.

In 2011, a TV report aiming to show what life was like for the poor in Denmark visited the home of a single mother on benefits, whose disposable income turned out to be 15,728 kroner (2,107 euros, $2,860) per month.

"Poor Carina", as she was later nicknamed, sparked a national debate on the level of unemployment benefits, with one pollster crediting her with fuelling a rise in the number of people who felt benefits were too high.

The entrance of the headquarters of 

Norwegian partially state-owned oil

 group Statoil, pictured in Stavanger, 

on January 18, 2013 (Scanpix/AFP/

File, Kent Skibstad)

The next Nordic country to reform its welfare state is likely to be Finland, battered by a downturn in the two pillars of its economy: the forest industry and information technology.

Helsinki responded to the crisis by announcing in August a slew of measures to put more Finns to work.

Under the controversial plan, the retirement age is to go up, time spent at university will go down, and incentives to enter the job market will be boosted for the unemployed and young mothers.

Only Norway looks unlikely to reform entitlements anytime soon, bolstered by its oil wealth.

The country is home to the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Worth some 5,116 billion kroner (610 billion euros, $830 billion), each of the country's 5,096,000 inhabitants is -- at least on paper -- a millionaire.

New centre-right Prime Minister Erna Solberg has pledged to preserve the welfare state.