Comment by alephnerd
4 months ago
Walk around Google Geneva (edit: doh, Zurich - my coffee hasn't kicked in), Novartis Basel, or CERN and count how many "Swiss" nationals there are. A large portion are white collar immigrants from CEE or Asia, or French commuters.
Switzerland's comparative advantage as an innovation hub was due to it's permissive capital structures and historic openness to white collar immigration.
All that a rule like this does is incentivize moving jobs out of Switzerland. Heck, look at UBS axing 3,000 jobs across all functions in CH and shifting them to India [0] last Wednesday.
If UBS, Novartis, Google Geneva (edit: doh, Zurich - my coffee hasn't kicked in), etc cannot continue to attract employees they will leave, and given the extremely friendly FTAs and BITs Switzerland [1] has signed either unilaterally or part of the EFTA, it's extremely easy.
Heck, look at how Syngenta went from being a Swiss major that employed thousands in Switzerland to a Chinese major that is about to IPO in Hong Kong [2] in just a decade.
Already 1 out of every 3 Swiss businesses is planning to shift out of Switzerland (primarily to the EU and US, but Asia comes up as well) [3].
Switzerland doesn't have the same comparative advantage in finance 40 years ago (why Basel when I can go to London, Frankfurt, or Amsterdam) nor manufacturing (why CH and not DE or CN) and this kind of ruling puts it's entire life sciences industry - the last industry within which CH remains a global leader - in jeopardy.
Additionally, Switzerland is not in the EU and is dependent on the EU-Switzerland FTA. If this were to pass, it would violate that FTA with Switzerland's largest trading partner. The EU can severely push back against CH, and France+Germany+Italy would very much support such retaliation as it would help incentivize Swiss businesses to shift out of Switzerland.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ubs-plans-hire-3000...
[1] - https://www.seco.admin.ch/seco/en/home/Aussenwirtschaftspoli...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/syngenta-targets-up-10-b...
[3] - https://www.thelocal.ch/20251023/swiss-companies-set-to-relo...
What is Google Geneva? They're in Zurich.
Swiss comp advantage started in WWII when they were used to exchange Nazis gold into other currencies - this gave them a topstart for the economic period after the war since they were perfectly connected globally and they understood to scale & keep this advantage for long time. Maybe its fading a little bit nowadays
This seems a highly biased view. You could also say that because Switzerland wasn’t war raged they had a had start.
> You could also say that because Switzerland wasn’t war raged they had a had start.
The Nazis may have found the Swiss more useful as a 'neutral' country than they would have as conquered territory:
> No, the controversy in Swiss conduct comes from three major factors. The trade in gold, Nazi banking, and Jewish banking.*
> When the war began, Germany had less than 50 million dollars in gold in their national stores. Yet, during the war, the Allies claimed that the Swiss purchased over 300 million in gold from the Germans. Where did the extra gold come from? Well, the obvious answer is that Nazi Germany stole it from the countries they invaded. With most powers unwilling to accept what was obviously stolen gold as payment for goods, the Swiss didn't have the same scruples. They bought the gold for Swiss francs, which Germany than could use to purchase stuff they needed from other neutral powers such as Turkey. When confronted after the war, the Swiss only would admit to 58 million of French and Belgian gold, which they compensated the respective national banks for. Investigations couldn't prove the rest, and when suspiciously new, gold 20-Fr pieces began appearing in the late 1940s, bearing dates from the 1930s, no one seemed able to prove that the Swiss had melted down the gold and was trying to secretly pass it into circulation.
> Gold wasn't all they got though. The Allies also believed there to be hundreds of millions in assets from Nazi officials stashed in Swiss bank accounts. As the occupying powers of Germany, the Allies claimed that ownership of these accounts defaulted to them, while the Swiss not only disagreed, but also claimed near total ignorance, as their strict banking laws prevented any disclosure verifying the claims. […]
* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rciqp/why_d...
> The Swiss helped transform almost four-fifths of all German gold into highly convertible Swiss Francs. As a result, Germany was able to buy strategic raw materials from Spain and Portugal.
> Switzerland as a nation was immensely important to the German military machine and economic planning. In 1941, for example, Hitler received a billion Swiss francs as credit for the Russian campaign.
* https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/nazis-neve...
Sure in finance (and even then it has been overshadowed by London, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam by the 2000s), but not really in innovation industries like the Life Sciences - which has historically been Switzerland's strongest niche and a major reason for Switzerland's modern success.
This was largely due to the success of Biogen in the 1980s which helped link American biopharma IP with the Swiss ecosystem along with a fairly permissive PR program for skilled foreign nationals.
Edit: cannot reply
> Roche and Lanza
Roche and Lanza would have remained CDMOs if it wasn't for Biogen bringing an entire generation of Harvard and MIT Biopharma researchers to Switzerland in the 1980s and helped build an ecosystem for therapeutics and biopharma R&D.
Much of Roche's biopharma and therapeutics leadership and IP is derived from Biogen alumni.
Some say Swiss was always "naturally lucky" due its location in the "blue banana" region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana
Biogen? Seriously?
Swiss pharma was driven by Roche and Lonza, which are much older than Biogen.
That analysis starts too late. Swiss advantages arose from ignoring other countries' patent laws in the 1850s.
To be honest during WWII, Switzerland was surrounded by the Nazis. Literally. On all sides, and learned a harsh lesson on not just the importance of military readiness but also economic resilience. So they took what they could get.
Switzerland is the best munitioned country on earth, because: After military service, most people keep their guns and are forced to yearly practicing (or loosing the gun) etc. - they are battle-ready every time.
Plus: they are the only(!) country on earth who could offer bunker protection to 95%+ of society in case of war.
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