Word: denmark
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...business leaders have won public support for all manner of business-friendly policies. Corporate taxes are lower than in the U.S., and capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income. There are few restrictions on trade. That, and it's easier to fire people in Denmark than anywhere else in Europe...
Then again, most of these things were true 14 years ago, and Denmark's welfare-state model seemed exhausted, beset by stagnant growth and double-digit unemployment. Some on the political right--including current Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who wrote a book in 1993 called From Social State to Minimal State--were convinced that taxes and spending had to be cut dramatically. But that was never in the cards politically, and Social Democrat Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (there are a lot of Rasmussens in Denmark), who became Prime Minister that year, crafted a compromise that kept the high taxes...
...Denmark has achieved its success has made it a darling of European social democrats and American liberals, and the country has been overrun lately with visiting journalists, academics and politicians looking for insights. One of the things a visitor discovers, though, is that Denmark's size and homogeneity--5.4 million people, of whom all but 478,000 are of Danish ancestry--are crucial to how the economy works. "We've been one small nation for 1,000 years," says Hans Skov Christensen, who as director general of the Confederation of Danish Industries negotiates the nationwide bargaining agreements between management...
...looks like something out of an enlightened management textbook. There are a few clear goals and lots of leeway to achieve them. In one fascinating study, two American sociologists found that Danish line workers have nearly as much job autonomy as supervisors do in the U.S., while supervisors in Denmark have about as much autonomy as upper managers...
John Strand runs a consulting firm that does work for most of the world's big wireless carriers and gets 95% of its revenue outside Denmark. It could be based pretty much in any city with a good airport. He says he keeps Strand Consult in Copenhagen largely because his Danish employees are so willing to argue with him and confront conventional wisdom. "Danes can think out of the box," he says...