- Bruce Rich
- Environental Forum
- March-April 2020
- pp. 34-39
As we enter the third decade of the 21st Century the world is not working out the way many of us hoped: we witness the failure of nations and politicians to address the climate crisis that threatens us all, as well as growing calls for an economic model that will give greater priority to social cohesion, community, and long term environmental sustainability. To put these aspirations into practice, we could learn something from a small, rich, entrepreneurial nation of a little over two million people, where the ratio of internationally competitive, high wage manufacturing to GDP is two and half times that of the U.S., and 20 percent higher than Germany or Japan. It’s a nation with the fifth highest life expectancy on the planet (at 83.5 four years higher than the U.S.). It’s a country that exports sophisticated machine tools to Germany and high tech components for interplanetary space probes to NASA. No it’s not Denmark, but the autonomous Spanish Basque Country.
