Foreign Investments in Sweden

General overview

Sweden contributes to the total European share by 2%. In 2010, foreign investments in Sweden were higher with 33% compared to the previous year. Sweden offers access to new products and technologies, skills and innovations, together with access to the Scandinavian market. The World Bank placed Sweden as the third most trade-friendly nation, due to its logistics and connections with international markets. In 2009, Netherlands, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom were the main investors in Sweden. The main industries that received foreign capital recently have been chemical and pharmaceutical.

Jobs in Sweden

According to the Ernst & Young’s European Attractiveness Survey, foreign investments created 1,125 new jobs in 2010 in Sweden. In 2007, the OECD Economic Survey (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) released the statistics of workforce and employment. The results showed that there were 4,838,000 people belonging to the labour force in Sweden, but only 4,541,000 were actually employed. As a percentage for the sectors that created most jobs, 57.6% were hired in services, 30.7% in industry, while 11.7% of the employees in Sweden were working in agriculture, forestry and fishing. In 2010, the CIA World Factbook mentioned an unemployment rate of 8.3%.

Figures

The OECD statistics estimated a gross domestic product of 307.1 billion EUR in 2007 for Sweden, while the figures published by the CIA World Factbook revealed a GDP of 240.7 billion EUR. USA and Netherlands invested massively before 2004 in setting up companies in Sweden. The 2006 statistics provided by the Swedish Institute showed that the country had 11,000 foreign-owned companies with 573,000 employees. 76% of the companies with foreign capital covered the service sector, most of them being placed in Stockholm. 

In 2009, the number of companies in the business service sector with foreign capital dropped to 2,445, out of which 18% were performing in financing, 16% in technical consultancies and 10% in advertising. The income generated by foreign investments in Sweden was estimated by Swedish Statistics in 2009 to 11.3 billion EUR. Between 2000 and 2009, European countries became a more reliable source of foreign capital year by year, while the United States, a major investor ten years ago, began to reduce its investments in Sweden.

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