Category Archives: Denmark

10/7/20: COVID19 Update: Sweden v Nordics


Sweden has been continuing its uncontested-by-anyone-else march toward thee non-existent 'herd immunity':


And the pipeline of upcoming intensive care patients seems to be un-abating:


In the mean time, the rest of the Nordics have crushed the curve. And this is without inclusion of Iceland. 

Personally, I cannot understand how Sweden's resident are tolerating this, but... who knows... 

20/06/20: COVID19 Update: Sweden v Other Nordics


Sweden is a now a verifiable basket case amongst the Nordic countries when it comes to the country management of the COVID19 pandemic:



The two charts above show that Sweden performance in both daily cases and deaths has been truly shockingly poor, compared to all other Nordic countries combined. The same is true in country-by-country comparatives.

In fact, based on ECDC data, were Sweden to perform as all other Nordics (including Estonia), its total number of cases of COVID19 registered would currently stand at 22,890, against its actual count of 54,443, and its death toll would have been 2,113 against its actual death toll of 4,877.

5/5/20: Sweden v Denmark: Covid19 experiences and outruns


For those interested, there's an ongoing debate about the benefits and costs of two different approaches to dealing with the Covid19 pandemic that are being contrasted in the case of Sweden (low level of restrictions) and Denmark (high level of restrictions). The two countries offer a decent 'natural experiment' data, due to their physical, cultural, historical and socio-economic proximities.

Peter Turchin dissects the evidence on the outcomes here: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/a-tale-of-two-countries/ in a very readable and, yet, empirically rigorous analysis.

The chart above is the key, although not the only source of the insights. Lines represent a fitted model, while points represent actual data.

What is notable in the above (some of it is in Peter's post, some is not) are the following features of the data:

  1. Death rates models in Denmark trail below those in Sweden, albeit the two converge into late April and reverse in early May. We do not know why, though Peter identifies one specific potential cause: slower and lower rate of testing in Sweden. Another potential cause can be the duration of treatment differences between the two countries. A third potential one, differences in vintage/strand of the virus. Etc...
  2. Actual death rates uptick in Denmark around May 1 seem to be relative outliers to the Denmark data (we do not know why, nor do we know if these are going to become a 'new normal' or a 'new trend'). These outliers are certainly responsible for the trend lines reversals.
  3. Actual death rates in Sweden are massively more volatile than those in Denmark. This volatility is most evident in April. This should imply serious differences in the accuracy/precision of both models, with Swedish model potentially down-weighing these upward outliers (this depends on the model used, of course).
The rest of conclusions are down to you, folks.

10/6/16: Wither Manufacturing? Evidence from Denmark


Couple of posts relating to most current research on the recovery and longer term prospects in global manufacturing. As usual here, we shall focus on the advanced economies.

A recent NBER paper, by Andrew Bernard, Valerie Smeets, and Frederic Warzynski, titled “Rethinking Deindustrialization” (March 2016, NBER Working Paper No. w22114: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2755386) looked at decline in manufacturing activity in Denmark, showing that “manufacturing employment and the number of firms have been shrinking as a share of the total and in absolute levels.” The authors examine this phenomena over the period of 1994 to 2007.

“While most of the decline can be attributed to firm exit and reduced employment at surviving manufacturers, we document that a non-negligible portion is due to firms switching industries, from manufacturing to services.”

Here is an interesting list of related findings based on looking closer at the “last group of firms before, during, and after their sector switch”:

  • “Overall this is a group of small, highly productive, import intensive firms that grow rapidly in terms of value-added and sales after they switch.”
  • “By 2007, employment at these former manufacturers equals 8.7 percent of manufacturing employment, accounting for half the decline in manufacturing employment.”
  • “…we identify two types of switchers: one group resembles traditional wholesalers and another group that retains and expands their R&D and technical capabilities.”

Net result? Quite surprising conclusion that the “findings emphasize that the focus on employment at manufacturing firms overstates the loss in manufacturing-related capabilities that are actually retained in many firms that switch industries.”


25/1/15: Swiss Out, Danes In: Pegs and Euro Mess


My comment from earlier this week on SNB and Denmark's Nationalbank pegs decisions (Expresso, January 24, 2015 page 09):

There are two truths about currency pegs.

The first one is that no Central Bank is an island. In other words, all pegs are temporary in their duration and costly in their nature, while held.

The second one is that exiting a peg with underlying conditions similar to those when the peg was set in the first place can never be a smooth and risk-free decision. Disruptive nature of such an exit is only highlighted by the necessity of the peg in the first place.


Swiss CHF to Euro peg is emblematic of the above two facts. The peg, de facto maintained from the summer 2011 (but officially launched on September 6, 2011) at the height of the euro area crisis, was designed to remove pressures on the Swiss Franc arising from the rapid acceleration of capital inflows from the euro area to Switzerland. The resulting inflows pushed values of CHF well beyond the sustainable bounds, threatening to derail the Swiss economy, heavily dependent (especially in 2011) on exports.

The cost of the SNB peg to the Swiss economy was manageable, but accelerating in recent months. As part of the peg, SNB printed CHF to purchase surplus euros. Bought euros were accumulated on the SNB balance sheet. recent devaluation of the euro against the US dollar, and expected future devalutations of the euro (on foot of upcoming ECB QE measures) pushes down the real value of these forex reserves accumulated by the SNB. Exiting the peg simply realigned these values to actual currency fundamentals and crystallised the loss in one go, de facto partially sterilising the inflows.

Chart below illustrates accumulation of Forex reserves by SNB from the peg introduction on September 6, 2011.



The disruption caused by the SNB exiting the peg has been significant. Some 46 percent of all Polish mortgages have been issued in CHF. Hundreds of thousands of loans in other Eastern European countries were tied to CHF as well. The cost of funding these loans rose by between 15 and 20 percent overnight, causing some panicked reactions from some Eastern European Central Banks. Beyond this, home-felt impact of SNB move has been less pronounced in the short run. However. in the longer term, stronger Swiss Franc is going to put severe pressure on Swiss exports and will likely result in deterioration in the overall balance of payments. Swiss economy is still heavily reliant on Forex valuations to support its global trade. Current world trade conditions - with the likes of Baltic Dry Index at 753,000 close to crisis period lows, and IMF projections for ever lower rates of global trade growth in 2015-2016 - all signalling serious pressures on Swiss exporters.


Denmark's decision to introduce a Krone/Euro peg this week is likely to fare about as well as that of the Swiss decision in 2011. Just as the Swiss, Danish regulators also set negative deposit rates to further reduce pressure on Krone from Euro inflows. However, the pressure on the Krone is rising not due to the crisis-related capital flight (as was the case with Switzerland in 2011-2013), but due to currency hedging in anticipation of the ECB quantitative easing move expected to be announced this week.

Danish peg is critically different from the SNB previous attempt to peg CHF. The reason for this is that Krone has a long-term link to the Euro and in effect current peg is simply a form of repricing this link. And, unlike CHF (which accounts for roughly 5.2 percent of global currency trading volumes), Krone is a relative minnow in the forex markets (its share of the global currency trade is only 0.8 percent).

The two factors make Krone peg more credible and less costly to defend over the medium term. But none of these factors help to alleviate the problem of currency valuations for Danish exporters, who will see their markets for exports more contested now that the Krone is appreciating against the Euro.



The reserves dynamics preceding the Denmark's peg introduction and the SNB peg announcement in September 2011 are similar: both currencies have sustained heavy 'buy' pressures and both pressures were driven by the crises in the euro area. SNB introduced the peg at relatively benign levels of forex reserves accumulation back in 2011 which, at the time, were nonetheless consistent with crisis-period peak levels. Denmark's Nationalbank's peg introduction also takes place close to crisis period peak of reserves accumulation and the question to be asked is: how much pain on DKK can Denmark take in this environment.