Sweden

The oldest central bank in Europe is Riksbank, which was founded in 1688 in Stockholm to issue “real” banknotes. In 1974, Gunnar Myrdal and Friedrich von Hayek shared the Nobel Prize “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena”. A statesman, Gunnar Myrdal helped improve Sweden’s budget and proposed the introduction of a new fiscal paradigm compatible with a reasoned use of the deficit. He wrote at length on economic cycles and taxation. For Gunnar Myrdal, economics is the most political of the sciences. His view was that poverty breeds poverty and that laissez-faire does not contribute to rebalancing but to reinforcing inequalities. He drew attention to the inherent tendency to create inequalities and their nefarious effect. In 1977, Bertil Ohlin and British economist James Meade shared the Nobel Prize “for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements”. Bertil Ohlin sought to understand the origin of comparative advantage and its benefits. In 1929, Ohlin and Keynes clashed over the question of whether Germany was able to make the war reparation payments imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. It is generally accepted that it was the chemist Svante August Arrhenius, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, who scientifically constructed the hypothesis of a greenhouse effect produced by CO2 in the atmosphere. Arrhenius would go further and lay the foundation for climate science.