Sweden
Profile written September 2026 · figures updated nightly
Where things stand
The latest published reading for each measure, with the last five years beside it.
01Structure
Sweden is a small economy with an unusually large stock of multinational firms: vehicles and trucks, telecommunications equipment, bearings and industrial machinery, pharmaceuticals, forestry and mining. Industry is about a seventh of value added, and research spending, at over three and a half per cent of GDP, is the highest of any economy carried on this site.
The pattern is old and deliberate: a home market too small to absorb what these firms make, so they were built to export from the start. It also means Swedish output depends on global investment demand rather than on Swedish consumption.
02Trade and exposure
Exports amount to a little over half of output, sold mainly into Germany, the Nordic neighbours and the United States. Because so much of what Sweden sells is capital equipment, the export cycle turns on other countries' willingness to invest — which is why Swedish manufacturing weakens early in a global slowdown and recovers early out of one.
Sweden also keeps its own currency, so a weak krona cushions exporters at the cost of a higher import bill. That channel does not exist for its euro-area neighbours and is part of why Swedish and Finnish cycles differ despite similar industrial structures.
03Energy and resources
Sweden imports only about a quarter of the energy it uses, the lowest dependency in the European Union after Estonia, because it generates nearly all its electricity without fossil fuel: roughly two fifths hydro, a quarter nuclear and just under a quarter wind.1
That mix gives energy-intensive industry — steel, mining, chemicals — electricity at prices its European competitors cannot match, and is the reason several fossil-free steel and battery projects chose the north of the country. The government has committed to new nuclear capacity, with large state credit guarantees, on the argument that electrification will roughly double demand.2
04Labour and demography
More than eighty per cent of 20- to 64-year-olds are in work, among the highest rates in Europe, and wages are set by collective agreement between unions and employer federations with almost no statutory minimum wage. Youth unemployment nonetheless runs above twenty per cent — a long-standing gap between insiders and entrants that Swedish labour-market policy has repeatedly tried and failed to close.
Integration of migrants into employment is the other structural gap, and the one that most divides Swedish politics.
05Public finances
Sweden's fiscal framework was rebuilt after the banking crisis of the early 1990s and is among the strictest in Europe: a target for the general government balance over the cycle, a debt anchor of thirty-five per cent of GDP, an expenditure ceiling fixed three years ahead and an independent fiscal council. Public debt has stayed near that anchor, one of the lowest ratios in the European Union.3
The exposure that remains is private rather than public. Household debt runs near one and a half times disposable income,4 most of it mortgages, so Swedish consumption responds to interest rates faster and harder than in almost any comparable economy.
06Money and prices
The Riksbank sets the rate shown above, targeting two per cent inflation. Sweden is a member of the European Union but not of the euro, having rejected it in a referendum in 2003, and the krona floats.
That independence is real but narrow. With an economy this open, the exchange rate feeds into import prices quickly, and because household balance sheets are so mortgage-heavy, the transmission from the policy rate to spending is unusually fast — so the Riksbank's room to diverge from the ECB is smaller in practice than it appears on paper.
07What the models expect
These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.
Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 1.00 on consumer price inflation, 1.52 on real gdp, 0.40 on unemployment rate, 0.64 on central bank policy rate, 2.45 on government debt.
08Structural indicators
The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.
| Measure | Value | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industry, share of gross value added | 13.4% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Exports, share of GDP | 52.7% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Energy import dependency | 26.5% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| R&D spending, share of GDP | 3.6% | 2024 | Eurostat |
| Employment rate, ages 20–64 | 81.8% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Youth unemployment rate | 23.2% | Jul 2026 | Eurostat |
| Government deficit | −1.3% | 2025 | Eurostat |
| Household debt, share of disposable income | ~150% | 2025 | Finansinspektionen |
09Sources and method
Live figures: Eurostat, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-12, next review September 2027.
- The electricity mix — Low Carbon Power, Sweden
- New nuclear capacity and the credit guarantees — World Nuclear Association, Sweden
- The fiscal framework and the debt anchor — Government of Sweden, the fiscal policy framework; European Commission, forecast for Sweden
- Household debt relative to income — Finansinspektionen, household debt