Switzerland has the highest number of patents and Nobel Prize winners per capita. I guess the challenges Switzerland has is to scale a company like the big tech companies can do in the United States with only 8 million in population compared to 340 million.
Pretty stupid statement. That's like saying that Liechtenstein is better run than the entirety of EU. Switzerland is a bunch of folks around mountains and a governance that allows its large corporates to do ANYTHING they please. They put a Swiss CEO in the driving seat and all others are international talent because the rest of the population occupies itself with building snowmen and skiing and collecting social handouts because NOBODY could otherwise afford the rediciulous prices in Switzerland. You know something is fucked when your own chocolate, milk, and cheese is 3 times as expensive than the exact same Swiss made product across the border in Germany or elsewhere.
As said, no surprise in a country that is basically run like a rich European city state or Hong Kong. Let a few large domestic players do anything they please and hire almost exclusively international talent and perform R&D. This stat is not a reflection of the Swiss population but the weird way it's economy is set up. It's own people are kept alive through government handouts, financed through the taxation of its conglomerates.
The United States does something interesting that only Eritrea does besides them. Citizen-based taxation. So people in other countries are free to move to tax havens like Dubai and pay no taxes. I wonder how much that prevents Americans from moving around the world to setup businesses where they could have more friendly benefits.
Canada taxes all its citizens and permanent residents based on world income. So does Japan and many other countries.
https://www.expertmarket.com/uk/crm-systems/the-ultimate-guide-to-work-place-productivity The Swiss work less than Americans (1767 vs. 1495 hours worked), but that doesn't mean they're less productive. Swiss people are more highly educated than Americans and are more likely to work in more highly skilled technical fields. Go across the border to Mexico where they work 2124 hours/year. You'll see a lot of people working many hours selling homemade arts/crafts garbage. Yes, they're technically working, but it's not productive work that's in high demand.
Sure if the US is your benchmark. I don't think any European country needs to put itself down by comparing itself with the US on any metric at all today. Fact remains that the stats you cite are heavily biased by the way the system is set up, very similar to Norway actually. Most it's people would not be able to survive on their own. They receive tons of social benefits by the country. Only difference is that all that in Norway is financed by its sovereign wealth fund. In Switzerland it's the taxes paid by its internationally operating corporations. And yes, it's always easier to organize education, health care, and safety in smaller places/economies, especially those where the fox and rabbit say goodnight to each other.
Don't short-change them, 8.7 million people or about the size of NYC. Like I said I question that rating - percentage only matter when comparing similar (or somewhat) values. Not something approx 3% the size of the other. Same for productivity and some other categories.
They're going to be more dependent on international recruits. The United States has more options from within. The makeup of a city like NYC will shift faster than the makeup of the whole country. A guy from Alabama might go work in NYC for a couple of years and be replaced by a guy from Colorado. Yes, this happens with international talent as well, but it's generally easier to hire/recruit from within a country's borders. The best of the best talent doesn't distribute the same way either. The largest companies in the United States (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, etc) will get a significantly higher percentage of the top talent than the next tier of companies.
I mean, I'm using the United States as the benchmark as it was the best performer over the past decade. It also holds the world's reserve currency. It has the largest financial market in the world. Using the States as my benchmark, I'm looking for places to beat it. Europe, China, and India are the only places in the world that can match the United States in terms of scalability. However, Europe is a mixture of countries (some better run than others), China is a communist dictatorship with limited economic freedom, and India is still highly protectionist/lacking economic freedom. So if I'm willing to sacrifice scalability where do I go?