Economics Explained Economics Explained

Sweden is a beautiful Scandinavian country famed for its beautiful people, flat-packed furniture, PewDiePie and meatballs. Now of course if you hadn’t guessed by the channels title we are only here to look Sweden's economy, and it is a remarkable one at that. Sweden is home to one of the highest standards of living in the world and is often held in extremely high regard when it comes to workers rights and general quality of life indicators such as working hours, happiness rates and life expectancy. It is also a nation with a rich history of setting the trend for other economies to follow, Sweden is home to the Riksbank founded in 1668 it is the oldest central bank in the world, blazing the path for monetary policy that dictates every major economy in the world today.

So how did it get here. We have explored rich nations with strong welfare systems that seem to do everything right on the channel before… most notably Norway, Sweden's little brother the to west… But Sweden is slightly different in the sense that it was not blessed with the Norwegian sea and its abundance of oil and gas, so it was not able to build up a sovereign wealth fund with oil profits like Norway was and so on paper it is citizens are poorer than Norway's but their quality of life seems exactly the same.
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The Philippines, a beautiful tropical archipelago of islands that forms one of the most important economies in the world today. This nation often flies under the radar as a quiet achiever but it is both interesting and important to understand because it may be the quintessential 21st-century growth nation, and that is not to say it is some super modern nation from the future, but rather it is to say that the story of the success and failures of the Philippines is by extension the story of the world today as more and more countries, modernize, embrace technology, trade internationally and bring their citizens into the global middle class.
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The Soviet Union is one of the most historically significant economies to understand, not only because it was the home to some of the most controversial economic practices ever, not only because it was a nation that altered world politics for the latter half of the entire twentieth century, or because it was home to one of the largest and most rapid economic declines in modern history, no no, all of that stuff is important and we will explore it, but more important than all of that is that even today, almost 30 years after the fall of the soviet union, the lessons of the nation and its economy are having lasting implications on the world today.
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South Africa is an economy that is really important to understand as a kind of potential outcome case study of inequality gone bad. The nation itself, on paper at least is not so terrible, it is actually one of if not the wealthiest nation in all of Africa, trading back and forth quite frequently with Nigeria.
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The phenomenon of brain drain is when the best and brightest workers from poor countries immigrate to rich countries in the pursuit of higher pay and living conditions. This can hinder the development of poor countries because many of their best workers leave.
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With GDP per capita of just $2 per day, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the poorest, if not the poorest nation on Earth. However, this does not have to be the case. The country has massive deposits of rare earth minerals including Cobalt, which is an essential input to the production of lithium-ion batteries. The mineral resources are estimated to be worth $24 trillion. So why is the DRC so poor?
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