Greens and Left best for business: survey

Sweden’s Green Party has the best ideas to help the country’s small business owners, a new survey reveals, with the Left Party ranking a close second.

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According to a survey carried out by the Swedish Federation of Business Owners (Företagarna), a proposal by the Green Party to lower payroll taxes is the most beneficial for small businesses.

The proposal, which calls for a 10 percent reduction in payroll taxes on wage payments up to 2.5 million kronor ($360,000), was viewed favourably by 60 percent of the survey’s respondents.

And a proposal by the Left Party which would absolve companies with fewer than 10 employees from the need to cover sick pay expenditures was seen as extremely beneficial to Sweden’s small business climate by 50 percent of business owners, according to the survey.

The third best proposal came from the Centre Party, which called for the scrapping of rules requiring that the last employee hired is the first one fired at companies with fewer than 50 employees.

Currently, only companies with fewer than 10 employees are allowed to partly sidestep the rule.

In order to protect the survey results from being skewed by party loyalties, respondents were not allowed to see which political parties put forward each proposal.

While the results of the survey were somewhat surprising, Företagarna CEO Anna-Stina Nordmark Nilsson remained circumspect about their significance.

“It’s one thing to propose business-friendly reforms, and another thing to implement them. Therefore, we plan to follow up with the parties to see if they actually push for their proposals. And with a year left until the election, it’s high time to start doing so,” she said in a statement.