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Swedes less well off than African Americans
STOCKHOLM, May 4 (Reuters) - Swedes, usually perceived in Europe as a comfortable, middle class lot, are poorer than African Americans, the most economically deprived group in the United States, a Swedish study showed on Saturday.
The study by a retail trade lobby, published in the liberal Dagens Nyheter newspaper 19 weeks before the next general election, echoed the centre-right opposition's criticism of the weak state of Sweden's economy after decades of almost uninterrupted Social Democratic rule.
The Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI) said it had compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999.
Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800 compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households, HUI's study showed.
"Weak growth means that Sweden has lost greatly in prosperity compared with the United States," HUI's President Fredrik Bergstrom and chief economist Robert Gidehag said.
International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden while in 1980, Swedish GDP per capita was 20 percent higher.
"Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists said.
If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
They said they had chosen that measure for their comparison to get around the differences in taxation and welfare structures. Capital gains such as income from securities were not included.
AMERICANS CAN BUY MORE
The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.
This meant that Swedes stood "below groups which in the Swedish debate are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households increased by just over six percent while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.
If the trend persists, "things that are commonplace in the United States will be regarded as the utmost luxury in Sweden," the authors said. "We are not quite there yet but the trend is clear."
According to HUI figures, in 1998-99 U.S. GDP per capita was 40 percent higher than in Sweden while U.S. private consumption and retail sales per capita exceeded Swedish levels by more than 80 percent.
The HUI economists attributed the much bigger difference in consumption and sales mainly to the fact that U.S. households pay themselves for education and health care, services which are tax-financed and come for free or at low user charges in Sweden.
According to recent opinion polls Sweden's Social Democrats are comfortably ahead of the centre-right opposition in the run-up to the September 15 elections.
The Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI) said it had compared official U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income as well as gross domestic product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and 1999.
Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, the median household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of $26,800 compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households, HUI's study showed.
"Weak growth means that Sweden has lost greatly in prosperity compared with the United States," HUI's President Fredrik Bergstrom and chief economist Robert Gidehag said.
International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden while in 1980, Swedish GDP per capita was 20 percent higher.
"Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI economists said.
If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest measured by household gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
They said they had chosen that measure for their comparison to get around the differences in taxation and welfare structures. Capital gains such as income from securities were not included.
AMERICANS CAN BUY MORE
The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.
This meant that Swedes stood "below groups which in the Swedish debate are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households increased by just over six percent while the poorest in the United States enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.
If the trend persists, "things that are commonplace in the United States will be regarded as the utmost luxury in Sweden," the authors said. "We are not quite there yet but the trend is clear."
According to HUI figures, in 1998-99 U.S. GDP per capita was 40 percent higher than in Sweden while U.S. private consumption and retail sales per capita exceeded Swedish levels by more than 80 percent.
The HUI economists attributed the much bigger difference in consumption and sales mainly to the fact that U.S. households pay themselves for education and health care, services which are tax-financed and come for free or at low user charges in Sweden.
According to recent opinion polls Sweden's Social Democrats are comfortably ahead of the centre-right opposition in the run-up to the September 15 elections.
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A quick,but usually not performed study of averages (which most of the left wouldn’t care about anyway) would take income+public goods provided by the government (free higher education, free healthcare etc...). And then of course you would have to take into account currency conversion issues (and use purchasing power parity rather than the exchange rate). What makes this really hard is that there is trade protection on certain types of goods and if a country imports there are transaction/transportation costs...
In any case, the following is a report on teh UN survey in 2000 that put Canada and Norway in front of the US in terms of “quality of life”. But the US did beat out Sweden so....
----
UN ranks Canada first in world -- again
By SUE BAILEY-- The Canadian Press
http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSFeatures0006/29_un.html
OTTAWA (CP) -- Canada has taken top spot for the seventh straight year in the United Nations Human Development Report 2000, but dropped three positions in a related poverty index.
The annually published ranking is an average measurement of 174 countries assessing life expectancy, adult literacy, education and income distribution.
Statistics were largely culled from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group of 29 countries that monitors global markets and human rights.
Canada's shortcomings include curtailed life spans for First Nations, literacy rates that could be improved and the lagging number of female professionals.
Prime Minister Jean Chretien glossed over such details, gushing Thursday that this is "the best country in the world in which to live."
Those who presented the index tempered their praise.
"Canadians should feel good," said Moustapha Soumare, special assistant to the UN Development Program (UNDP).
"But they also need to understand there are some areas where they really need to make a lot of progress."
For the first time, this year's report strongly connects human rights with human development.
"There's an intrinsic link," said Warren Allmand, president of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development.
To live free of poverty and have access to a decent living standard are basic rights and "not just something nice to do," he added.
So-called economic and social rights "are too often ignored, marginalized, played down," Allmand said.
"They're called wish-list items."
True support of human rights would not allow western corporations to exploit cheap labour in developing nations or spur civil conflict for economic gain, he added.
Canada fell to 11th from eighth place on a separate poverty scale for industrialized nations, mostly because performance on minority rights was considered in this report.
It says life expectancy rates for First Nation men were 13 to 17 years shorter than for the general population of Canadian men in 1991, although Statistics Canada recently reported this gap is slowly closing.
The poverty index measures deprivations in longevity, knowledge and a decent standard of living.
Norway topped the list for best treatment of its poor, followed by Sweden and the Netherlands. The United States ranked 18th.
The index methodology is flawed for assessing who is "poor" in comparative terms instead of according to who truly lacks basic necessities, said Patrick Basham, social policy director for the conservative Fraser Institute in Vancouver.
He also questioned the idea of guaranteeing freedom from poverty as a human right.
"If people aren't successful, the democratic system has to determine what is the level of public subsidy that's appropriate.
"Guaranteeing things which really should be rewards for individual effort is just so counter-productive."
Canada placed eighth for gender empowerment -- an assessment of how political and economic power is divided between men and women.
While women occupy 37 per cent of managerial and administrative positions in Canada, the comparable figure in Honduras is 54 per cent, says the report.
It stops short of specific recommendations on these issues but is more a mirror held up to spur debate and reflection, said Soumare.
Other analysts warn the index can be misleading, and human rights organizations have objected to the top score for Canada.
The UNDP, which developed the index, has expressed concerns about the way some politicians have used it as an excuse not to make improvements.
Kate Raworth, an economist at UNDP, pointed out that statistics can be abused. She said the index measures successes in various areas but fails sometimes to point out specific problems.
"We never say you are the best country in the world to live in," she said in an interview, distancing the UN from Chretien's well-publicized boast. "You have to do something about human rights, or the education system."
Still, the overall human development index ranks Canada first -- followed by Norway, the United States, Australia, Iceland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan and Britain.
The four countries at the bottom of the index's 174 countries are Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone.
has nothing to do with wealth. Just shows that rich, fat, sedentary people don't live quite as long as sushi eaters, snow skiiers, etc.
If you want to measure the soundness of recent economic policies (just in terms of averages) one should look at the growth rate of the GDP rather than just the current value (after all Sweden was much poorer than the US in the 1800s). What's impressive about Sweden is that a relatively backward country has become a rather large producer of industrial and high-tech products (with a higher ownership rate of cell phones and internet access than the US).
http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2002/tables/table4-1.pdf
http://www.pwt.econ.upenn.edu/papers/BRUSSELS.PDF
http://www.reed.edu/~gronkep/pol370-f01/norris.htm
When you compare distributions of income, the US doesn’t compare well to most other industrialized countries independent of their policies. To get a good feel for what happens when a country tries to copy US economic polices one has to look no father than Argentina.
90% of the time you can find a statistic to support your argument. 60% of all people know that!
GDP per capita is a pretty meaningless metric. Look at the bay area, you could earn $100,000 per year and still have trouble finding a place to live.