All this deregulation coincided with the rise of the internet, which meant that more people were creating businesses at the same time that they were experimenting with new technology. In the 1990s, the government gave a tax break to companies that gave their employees home computers, on the condition that these computers were available to everyone, whether they managed the company or cleaned the toilets. At the same time, the government invested early in fast internet service. Though Sweden’s computer adoption rate was similar to that of the U.S., it primed entrepreneurs to think digitally when the reforms of the 1990s opened the country to development. “Every inhabitant of Sweden under 40 basically grew up with a PC in their home,” PJ Pärson, a partner at Northzone, a London-based venture-capital firm, told me. “In the 1990s, pretty much everyone was online.” (Even today, Sweden has among the fastest internet speeds in the world, with an average speed of 22.5 megabits per second, compared to 18.7 megabits per second in the United States.)

This captures the experience of Birk Nilson, one of the co-founders of Tictail, a Swedish e-commerce company that has raised $32 million in funding. Having a computer as a kid motivated Nilson to begin coding at a young age, he told me, in Tictail’s Stockholm offices, where programmers are crammed into an open office space and where the foosball tables feature hockey players instead of soccer players. Nilson, who is now 33, learned to code at age 11. He began working in tech when he was in high school, creating a blog for a Swedish magazine when he was 16. By the time he was 19, he’d met his co-founders and began working on Tictail.

Like many Swedish start-ups, Tictail began as a global company, and Nilson and his cofounders always planned to sell internationally. Because Sweden’s size means there is a limited market for its companies’ products, those companies often plan to sell internationally from the outset, and so are subject to a great deal of international competition, which tends to make them nimbler. In the U.S., by contrast, firms can afford to focus almost exclusively on the large base of consumers in-country, without having to face foreign rivals and competitors. “We’re kind of raised to think about exporting,” Nilson told me. Tictail recently moved its headquarters to New York, and opened up a storefront on the Lower East Side. The U.S. is Tictail’s largest market at the moment.

All of these dynamics, added up, create a lot of businesses, which in turn employ a lot of people. Swedish companies that survive for at least three years create five new jobs for every existing 100 jobs in the economy, according to the OECD, while that number is only two in the U.S. “When you look at the total net job creation in Sweden relative to other countries, Sweden is one of the best performing countries,” Calvino, the OECD economist, said. Start-ups in Sweden also have among the highest survival rate after three years; 74 percent of all its start-ups make it past three years.