Word: sweden
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Once, its very name was synonymous with the good life. No longer. Today Sweden, the postwar living example of the affluent materialistic paradise, is caught in a raging economic crisis, the like of which few industrial countries have seen since the 1930s. Workers who used to boast of their high living standards and womb-to-tomb social welfare system nowadays demonstrate in the streets to demand speedy government action to stop soaring prices and booming unemployment...
Last year, according to bank estimates, Sweden was one of the three Western European countries to suffer a fall in gross national product (the others: Britain and Finland), and its drop of 2.5% was the largest. At the same time, it suffered a balance of payments deficit of $3.4 billion, industrial output fell more than 4%, inflation roared along at 16% and real unemployment...
...malaise has its roots in the worldwide recession of 1974 and 1975. At first Sweden seemed to have found its own unique answer to the slump: ignore it so as to be ready for the expected global economic upturn. While other countries struggled with recession and layoffs, the Socialist government of Prime Minister Olof Palme simply subsidized industry. Companies were paid to maintain full production and full employment, even when they could not sell and had to stockpile their goods in anticipation of a surge in demand. The immediate result was a flush of apparent prosperity, which allowed militant unions...
Certainly the congress delegates -from the U.S., Britain, Canada, Denmark, Portugal, Israel, Sweden, Italy and Japan-bore no marks of second-class citizenship. "We're all survivors," said one jolly fellow who has dispatched, at last count, 332 odds and sods. They are a joky, well-tailored squad who, amazingly, carry no stilettos for their fellow authors. Some of the most famed and envied than-atologists are, of course, very rich: Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert Ludlum, Fred Dannay (a.k.a. Ellery Queen) and Ellin, among others. Britain's artful Desmond Bagley, who has yet to make much...
...Enemy by Desmond Bagley (Doubleday; $7.95). One of Europe's bestselling suspense writers concocts drama of genetic manipulation, incidental assassination, government machination and Russian marination. Bagley, 54, who knows his computers and test tubes, is equally at home with his locales (England and Sweden, in this book) and his personae, who can be both touching and tough. The Bagleyan denouement raises his novel from mere artifice to the artful...