Though Western Europe is often lazily portrayed as a monolithic bastion of welfare-state sclerosis, it is in fact robustly heterogeneous. France has a brittle pension system and rigid labor markets, but the Dutch, Swedish, and Swiss pension systems are considered to be among the soundest in the world, and Danish labor flexibility rivals that of the United States. The aggregate tax burden is punishingly heavy in France, Germany, Italy, and the Nordic countries, but it is relatively light in Ireland and Switzerland.
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