and the other nordic countries. in the nordic countries, support for populist parties has ranged between 15 – 20 percent in recent years. in finland, the ( true ) finns party has scored between 17 – 19 percent of the vote in the last three national elections in 2011 – 19. so why is it so that even the “ happiest people in the world ” are so prone to populist temptations? as mentioned, the combination of economic insecurity and threats to national identity appear to trigger populist surges. this is amplified if the political system fails to address citizens ’ concerns. in fact, the economic argument about populism seems to be as much about distribution as aggregate growth – a favourable macro - economic development may mask big differences across different groups. the distributional impacts of a key driver of today ’ s changes – especially technological development, such phenomena as artificial intelligence, automatization, digitalisation, robotics – have been widely recognised for some time. initially, technological development mainly crowded out low - skilled labour. but more recently, with the latest advances in artificial intelligence, it is many medium - skilled jobs that are being threatened, thus placing an even bigger premium on high - skilled jobs and education. one very relevant and realistic recent book that relate to populism is by torben iversen and david soskice called democracy and prosperity – reinventing capitalism through a turbulent century. they refute the crisis of democracy, and rather call the present state of affairs as a challenge for democracy. as comparative or international political economists, their point of departure is the ongoing economic transformation into a fully - fledged knowledge economy, which is very skill - intensive. for them, the question is how the majority of the people – or voters – can feel that they have a place, stake and future for their children in the society. the key intervening variable is education. not primarily as a civilizational project, but rather as a way of maintaining one ’ position in the reasonable prosperous middle class, or at least keeping up the aspiration for one ’ s children. they underline the ‘ aspirational vote ’ of the middle class. iversen and soskice also counter the argument that states are powerless in the face of international capitalism. for them, location matters, and it is the clusters of industries that drive the economy and the thriving cities that attract people. again, education and training are critical to keep the people on board. and the democratic

and foremost fulfils a need that the krona market cannot completely satisfy. the euro market is perceived as deeper and more liquid, and thus provides an opportunity to borrow large volumes. i am thinking here of, for instance, the large swedish corporations'need of capital to finance the major structural deals made in recent years. in order to borrow really large volumes, companies like volvo, vattenfall and ericsson have largely turned to the euro market to issue bonds. from this perspective the euro has proved to be an interesting financing alternative to the other large currencies - the dollar and the yen - for large swedish corporations. small and medium - sized companies, on the other hand, still turn mainly to the krona market. development on the money market are largely the same. it is quite clearly the larger corporations that are active in euro, for instance through certificate programmes, while the smaller companies issue their certificates on the krona market. at the same time, it should be said that the total swedish activity on the euro money market is very limited. swedish firms'euro activity on the stock markets is not particularly widespread, either. according to the stockholm stock exchange statistics, only six swedish companies have chosen to be listed on exchanges in the euro area. swedish companies'interest in becoming listed abroad is mainly aimed towards london and new york. nor have many companies taken up the stockholm stock exchange's offer to list shares in euro, either exclusively or parallel, on the om stockholm exchange. three companies took up this offer in 1999 ; electrolux, nordea and stora enso. since then no other companies have shown an interest. there has also been very limited trading in these shares. it can be concluded that the role played by the euro in sweden is a small one, even in other contexts. this is not really surprising, as the krona is the only legal means of payment that everyone is obliged to accept in sweden. according to the price information act, goods sold to individual consumers in sweden must be priced in the currency relevant to the customer. the act does not state which currency prices should be stated in, but as long as most wages are paid in krona, the retail trade is obliged to price goods in krona. the role of the krona as a means of payment and unit of account is thus protected. although there is great freedom to choose other currencies, the krona thus has a special position in the swedish economy. there are also strong economic