by Dan Mitchell | Oct 6, 2025 | Blogs, Europe
I left Iceland this morning, where I spoke at a conference examining whether that island nation in the North Atlantic should join the European Union. My speech focused on the European Union’s economic performance (which is anemic and on...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 29, 2023 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation, Welfare and Entitlements
Scandinavian countries have very unusual economic policy. They are very free market-oriented with regards to most types of economic policy. The glaring exception is fiscal policy, where these nations get very low scores. The burden of...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 15, 2023 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
There is a recipe for achieving growth and prosperity and I used a grade-point-average analogy earlier this year to explain why it is important to get all the ingredients correct. Let’s look at some empirical data. I wrote back in March about the Heritage...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 27, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
Iceland is a tiny little country with just 338,000 people (about the population of Santa Ana, CA), but that doesn’t mean it can’t teach us lessons about public policy. I wrote about the nation’s approach to fisheries in 2016, and explained that the property...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 30, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
Folks on the left sometimes act as if the Nordic nations somehow prove that big government isn’t an impediment to prosperity. As I’ve pointed out before, they obviously don’t spend much time looking at the data. So let’s give them a reminder. Here are the rankings...