Switzerland in 2012

41,285 sq km (15,940 sq mi)
(2012 est.): 7,998,000
President Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf

The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report proclaimed the economy of Switzerland the world’s most competitive in 2012. It was the fourth year in a row that the country had received the honour; Switzerland’s innovation and its efficient labour market were cited as its greatest strengths. The country also earned high scores for its scientific research institutions, collaboration between industry and academia, company investment in research and development, and protection of intellectual property. These strengths were reflected in Switzerland’s ranking second in the world in the per capita rate of product patenting.

Switzerland was not a member of the crisis-struck EU, and domestic consumption remained relatively healthy. In the second quarter of 2012, however, a decline in the export of services caused a slight but unanticipated 0.1% quarter-on-quarter fall in overall economic activity. Until then, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) appeared to have warded off successfully the threat of recession and preserved the competitiveness of Switzerland’s exports by capping the value of the Swiss franc at 1.20 per euro; to maintain this position, the SNB had been forced to buy hundreds of billions of euros. Meanwhile, the SNB predicted that while Switzerland would avoid recession, growth for the remainder of the year would be subdued and GDP would increase by only a small amount. In May the Swiss government reimposed immigration quotas on workers from central and eastern European countries.

Switzerland remained embroiled in disputes with several foreign governments over “offshore” accounts held by their citizens in Swiss banks. Since 1934 Swiss law had guaranteed the secrecy of account holders, which was believed to have encouraged wealthy foreigners to keep money in Swiss banks and thereby avoid payment of taxes at home. In 2012 the European Commission urged the United Kingdom and Germany to renegotiate agreements struck in 2011 under which the Swiss authorities would tax the accounts held by British and German citizens and transfer the money directly to the relevant foreign government. These agreements were contentious, however, because they preserved the anonymity of account holders. The United States went farther, demanding that Swiss banks hand over their American clients’ names. In 2012 the U.S. launched investigations into 11 Swiss banks and indicted Switzerland’s oldest private bank, Wegelin, for conspiracy to defraud by concealing undeclared accounts from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. The U.S. also acquired the names of thousands of employees of the bank Credit Suisse in an attempt to link them to the bank’s American clients, while the government of the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia purchased leaked data relating to German clients of Credit Suisse and Julius Bär. There was speculation that these moves would prompt foreigners to move their assets to other financial centres such as Hong Kong and Singapore.

In July scientists at CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research—announced that they had discovered the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that gives other particles their mass, at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. The particle’s existence had been hypothesized for 48 years but had not been confirmed. The discovery in turn supported the so-called standard model—the theory formalized in the mid-1970s to explain how the universe works.

In July Swiss tennis great Roger Federer won a record-equaling seventh Wimbledon men’s singles title. He beat the U.K.’s Andy Murray, who, one month later, topped Federer for the men’s singles gold medal at the Olympic Games in London. In September voters in a referendum rejected the introduction of a total ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces.