The WEF is a kind of a 'personally politicized' entity I don't mean that in a bad way. It's not some official government thing working on economically secular issues. It was founded by a dude interested in economic advancement and wellbeing of 'the world'. But it's made of people with personalities, agendas - and I don't mean cynically or negative, it's just part of the NGO landscape. It's a very European centric and is naturally going to be supportive of developing and promoting 'innovation' in the broadest sense for its constituents and relations.

Someone in the group may have had a meeting with someone from the city of Stockholm either public or private, which gave them the impetus or idea to talk about how they've been successful.

The author of the post, 'Sean Fleming' is a journalist from the UK with a background in PR, more than likely he's hired to 'write stuff' that is favourable to the WEF, and so this seems like a neat thing to talk about.

Basically, it's PR. There's nothing wrong with it, but that's what it is.

I'm doubtful that anyone in such a position is paid remotely enough to go really in-depth and to discover the underlying correlational factors such as the effect of very high taxes, or the real productive measures of '6 months off'.

It's just a little note from the WEF on how Sweden might possibly have some interesting differentiating thing.

For sure the article feels like PR. I was asking especially about the part of the comment regarding “the WEF pushing for stagnation in Europe” (paraphrasing), that’s the part that sounds counter intuitive to me.

Sure, but can you afford my consulting fees?