http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/020504/sweden_poverty_1.html
Swedes less well off than poorest Americans -study
STOCKHOLM, May 4 (Reuters) - Swedes, usually perceived in Europe as a
comfortable, middle class lot, are poorer than African Americans, the most
economically deprived group in the United States, a Swedish study showed on
Saturday.
The study by a retail trade lobby, published in the liberal Dagens Nyheter
newspaper 19 weeks before the next general election, echoed the centre- right
opposition's criticism of the weak state of Sweden's economy after decades
of almost uninterrupted Social Democratic rule.
The Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI) said it had compared official
U.S. and Swedish statistics on household income as well as gross domestic
product, private consumption and retail spending per capita between 1980 and
1999.
Using fixed prices and purchasing power parity adjusted data, the median
household income in Sweden at the end of the 1990s was the equivalent of
$26,800 compared with a median of $39,400 for U.S. households, HUI's study
showed.
"Weak growth means that Sweden has lost greatly in prosperity compared with
the United States," HUI's President Fredrik Bergstrom and chief economist
Robert Gidehag said.
International Monetary Fund data from 2001 show that U.S. GDP per capita in
dollar terms was 56 percent higher than in Sweden while in 1980, Swedish GDP
per capita was 20 percent higher.
"Black people, who have the lowest income in the United States, now have a
higher standard of living than an ordinary Swedish household," the HUI
economists said.
If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest measured by household
gross income before taxes, Bergstrom and Gidehag said.
They said they had chosen that measure for their comparison to get around
the differences in taxation and welfare structures. Capital gains such as
income from securities were not included.
AMERICANS CAN BUY MORE
The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the
median for all U.S. households while Swedish households earned 68 percent of
the overall U.S. median level.
This meant that Swedes stood "below groups which in the Swedish debate are
usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and
Gidehag said.
Between 1980 and 1999, the gross income of Sweden's poorest households
increased by just over six percent while the poorest in the United States
enjoyed a three times higher increase, HUI said.
If the trend persists, "things that are commonplace in the United States
will be regarded as the utmost luxury in Sweden," the authors said. "We are
not quite there yet but the trend is clear."
According to HUI figures, in 1998-99 U.S. GDP per capita was 40 percent
higher than in Sweden while U.S. private consumption and retail sales per
capita exceeded Swedish levels by more than 80 percent.
The HUI economists attributed the much bigger difference in consumption and
sales mainly to the fact that U.S. households pay themselves for education
and health care, services which are tax-financed and come for free or at low
user charges in Sweden.
According to recent opinion polls Sweden's Social Democrats are comfortably
ahead of the centre-right opposition in the run-up to the September 15
elections.