Demographics, Statistics, and History
Sweden is the largest county in Scandinavia, located in Northern Europe. It is bordered by the Baltic Sea, Gulf of Bothnia, Kattegat, and Skagerrak, between Finland and Norway (1). The Sweden that we know of today materialized out of the Kalmar Union which had been formed by the unification of the country by King Gustav Vasa in 1397. Since then Sweden has gained territories and also had to give up territories from the 17th century to today with the last war in 1814 when they entered into a personal union with Norway. Since the last war Sweden has been at peace adopting a foreign policy of neutrality during wartime and a non-aligned during peacetime (2).
After the economy was stagnant in 1970’s it faced large imbalances in the 1980’s and this all followed by a financial crisis and a subsequent recession ending in the mid 90’s which caused for a number of institutional changes. Sweden joined the EU in 1995 but has still not accepted the Euro as its currency. Entering the EU helped bring full integration in the European market place of the trade-oriented Swedish economy. Sweden is the third largest country in Europe and the 55th largest in the world when it comes to size, but when we take a look at its total population it is considered to be rather small. The current head of the state of the Kingdom of Sweden is King Carl XVI Gustaf, who follows a constitutional monarchy political system with a central government that is center-right majority, which has been ruling since the election in 2006, with the next scheduled elections to be in 2010. The official language is Swedish, which is a North Germanic language. The current population is said to be roughly 9.1 million covering an area of 450,000 square kilo ...