The Swiss have benefitted from maintaing a sound fiscal house and associated currency, over time. The US, much of Western Europe and Japan have been busy debasing themselves with enormous financial mistakes over the last several decades.
You can see two disastrous dollar periods in that chart. The Vietnam War, Johnson-Nixon, spending irresponsibility and inflation disaster of the 1970s. And the Bush war-on-terror, pump your way out of a recession to get re-elected, fiscal disaster of 2002-2008 (then the final nail in that stupidity wagon with the great recession crash that the Fed caused with interest rate mistakes after 9/11).
The US and Switzerland had the same GDP per capita in 2000, prior to the fiscal mistakes that sank the dollar shortly thereafter. Now it's more like $62,500 vs ~$80,000. If the US had been financially frugal, the dollar would be worth a lot more than it is today and the Swiss GDP per capita would be at least 1/3 lower in dollar terms.
By 1985, with the Volcker strong dollar, the US GDP per capita overtook Switzerland, $18k vs $16k. And before that, with the weak 1970s dollar, by 1980 the US was at ~$12k and the Swiss were nearly 50% higher at $18.
Which is to say, the horrible financial choices that Washington DC has made since the late 1960s, has severely harmed the average American, their purchasing power, their ability to save vs real inflation, their ability to see wage gains exceed the rate of real inflation consistently, and the ability of GDP growth to maximally exceed real inflation.
>* The Swiss have benefitted from maintaing a sound fiscal house and associated currency, over time. The US, much of Western Europe and Japan have been busy debasing themselves with enormous financial mistakes over the last several decades.*
No, these other countries are all industrial producers (and Switzerland isn't), therefore profiting from low exchange rates.
No, Switzerland is in fact a large industrial producer and exporter given its economic size. Their goods exports as a share of their economy are larger than the US for example.
Switzerland: "About 74% of Swiss GDP is generated by the service sector and 25% by industry. The contribution from the agricultural sector is less than 1%." [1]
By contrast, nearly 80% of the US economy is service sector based.[2] Japan is around 70% for its service sector as a share of its economy. Switzerland isn't far off of Japan.
The typical high-income nation has 74% of its economy comprised of the service sector, which is exactly where Switzerland is.
Exports (including services) account for nearly half of Switzerland's economy. Just one industrial good export, packaged medicaments, as a share of their total GDP (5.1%) is nearly equal to all combined US exports (including service exports) as a share of the US economy (all US exports are 5.8% of the US economy).[3] Switzerland is very clearly an industrial economy as well as a service econonomy.
