ABSTRACT
Sweden’s VC market is the largest by far in northern Europe, indeed like Finland’s it stands out as one of the more impressive markets in the world on a per capita basis. The market is larger than Spain’s, for example, although Italy’s GDP is around five times larger than Sweden’s, with a population base that is six times larger. Finland’s market is also impressive. Yet again, it should be remembered that large markets are often the result of the domination of large firms going after large firms with buy-outs or the most advanced stages of expansion and replacement funds. Denmark, by contrast, is a country of smaller businesses; this has led to similarly high standards of living, but comparatively less capital market momentum. From the perspective of this study, some of the momentum in northern Europe will hopefully continue to trickle back to small firms, but for the moment a lot of it is interesting but not particularly important for these firms.
