Part II: What’s the Better Role Model, France or Switzerland?

May 2, 2025 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Editor's Note: First, the term "economic freedom" should never appear in an article with any European nation unless it describes the lack thereof in my view.  All of Europe has been socialist forever in lesser or greater degrees and recent decades the green movement has worsened their economic viability.  As for being good on trade, libertarians have a disturbing mental block about the reality of trade agreements and tariffs.  Having said that, I published this anyway. RK

Switzerland is a role model (the freest nation, the most-sensible nation, etc) and France is suffering from statism (biggest spending burden, confiscatory taxes, etc).

As such, nobody should be surprised to learn that Switzerland is more prosperous. But even I was surprised to see data from the World Bank showing that per-capita GDP is more than two times higher than it is in France.

That’s a jaw-dropping difference, especially since the two countries were almost equal 50 years ago. So we definitely have another entry for our anti-convergence club.

I first compared France and Switzerland back in 2013.

All that has happened in the past dozen years is that Switzerland has maintained much better policy and widened its economic advantage.

I normally highlight fiscal policy differences when comparing nations, but here’s a tweet from Michael Arouet showing the difference between Swiss labor law and French labor law.

What makes the comparison even more dramatic is that the the Swiss labor law pamphlet would be much smaller if it was just printed in one language like the French book.

But the Swiss version includes separate sections show their labor law in French, German, Italian, and Romansh.

The obvious takeaway, as Mr. Arouet notes, is that it obviously is much simpler to create jobs in Switzerland.

I’ll close by showing how both nations rank according to the latest edition of the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World.

Give France credit for being better on trade, but Switzerland wins the other four categories.

P.S. Looking at specific issue areas, Switzerland has better policy on health care, retirement, and many different ways of measuring fiscal policy. And it goes without saying that the Swiss are better on gun rights.