In April last year, a group of nearly 60 EU officials travelled to Sweden on a fact-finding mission to meet Nasdaq Stockholm, operator of the country’s highly successful stock market. During a two-hour session on “capital markets ecosystems”, the exchange’s executives explained why so many small and medium-sized businesses are deciding to list in Stockholm.
Compared with the rest of Europe, Swedish households hold among the highest proportion of their investments in listed companies and among the lowest in bank deposit holdings, while financial literacy is greater than in Germany, France or Spain. In 1984, the government introduced Allemansspar, a product enabling ordinary Swedes to invest in stock markets. By 1990 there were already 1.7mn of these accounts, helping drive the launch of domestically focused small and mid-cap funds.