Sweden at the bottom of the entrepreneurship despite the high rhetoric

Sunday, 01 April 2012
Following the stance taken by the Swedish government and the its opposition relating to laws governing Sweden's smaller business, curious Swedish snoopers decided to look at what similar business life was like in other countries. Conclusively without doubt it turns out that when compared with the rest of the world, Sweden is not very good for business start ups

If high-employment is a measure of how a country performs in that direction, then Sweden is not doing well at all. This therefore opens for some discussion. In a country where everyone has a job, new start ups will be low, but unemployment will also be zero.

During time of low activities such as now, in many countries many start-up could be observed and this will says something about how attractive it is to become entrepreneurs. When one looks at the Swedish figures, it is not a very good reading. Both in terms of creation and the number of entrepreneurs in the population, Sweden has moved so far behind in international comparisons, according to figures from the Swedish database on international data, ekonomifakta.se

5.8 percent of Swedes of working age were entrepreneur last year. The very top of the list of those countries where activities were seen high in this sector were China and Chile with 24 percent of the population. If a comparison is done with countries that have similar standard of development as Sweden the numbers look better, but still not good:

Leading entrepreneurs could be found in these countries
Country	Percentage start ups
United States	12.3 percent
Australia:	10.5 percent
Netherlands	8.2 percent
UK:	7.2 percent
Norway:	6.9 percent

The only Nordic country that is poorer than Sweden is Denmark, where only 4.6 per cent run their own business.

Even when it comes to starting up new businesses, it looks bad. Viewed as the proportion of new businesses to the total number of companies in the country, Sweden has only 7.1 percent.

This means that for every 1 000 companies there are in Sweden, only 71 new ones are newly.
Sweden thus lies bottom on a list topped among others by countries such as Estonia, France and the Netherlands. In France 150 new companies per 1000 existing ones are launched each year - more than twice as many as in Sweden.

Unfortunately the reason for the los start ups in Sweden has not been properly explored in the past. Even as we have been reporting in the past on this network about the low statute of business operations and the zeal to start new business in Sweden, not one is properly looking at how this situation can be improved.

We have analysed earlier that Sweden is a country where starting a business require a lot of money and a lot of procedures. Official the government puts it down to Skr50,000 to be presented before a business is registered as a limited liability.

Then after that registration whether money is made in the first year or not that company has to folk out lost of money to pay accounts so that the books could be acknowledged. This is a big waste of badly needed capital which looks like the government need that it should be used instead of investing but to pay for bottle necks. Many companies actually start but dies before their first product reach the market just because of bottle necks.

Another point here is that Sweden is a country of franchises. All the world’s top companies have franchises in Sweden. Since these franchises are already created elsewhere and require big capital, only those who can have access do. Entrepreneurs who want to compete but have less know names will never get ant form of funding

Lastly Sweden is a very string network country. If you are not a member of that network you will never make. Sweden is not a country like the UK or USA where one dream. There is no dream in Sweden. Therefore those who have no connection and want to start a good business usually emigrate and do that from abroad. Had Sweden been more open such as the UK, there would have been thriving businesses and entrepreneurs.
By Scancomark.se Team

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