There are many countries with welfare regimes similar in size to those of Scandinavia. They are qualitatively quite different. A rough categorization:
- Liberal regimes (means tested but with relatively equal benefits between participants, market oriented) are typical of the Anglosphere. Food stamps in the United States are an archetypical liberal program.
- Corporatist (aka conservative, Christian-democratic) regimes (many recipients with highly unequal benefits, often tied to family status or employment) are typical of continental Europe, especially. Unemployment insurance is an archetypical corporatist program.
- Social-democratic regimes (extensive universal benefits, direct provision of public services, full employment as an explicit policy goal) are typical of Scandinavia. The Finnish national pension system is an archetypical social-democratic program.
Of course no currently existing states are purely one of these ideal types, but they do cluster. Social-democratic welfare states (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and to some extent the Netherlands) significantly outperform conservative ones with comparable levels of public spending (e.g. France, Austria, Germany).
That's orthogonal. Having a massive sovereign fund as your rainy day fund goes a long way in your strategic long term thinking and budget planning compared to countries washout that rainy day fund.
>There are many theories why the Scandinavian model works on Scandinavia but does not seem to work other places, but to my best knowledge, natural resources are not any of these explanations.
Because lack of corruption, government transparency and regulations plus a high trust society are also needed, not just pooling all our tax money for welfare.
And those qualities don't exist in many other countries. Scandinavian countries are the global exception, not the norm.
The norm everywhere else is "everyone for himself, fuck you I got mine, you go get yours, if you're poor it's your fault for being lazy", despite implementing various welfare programs similar to Scandinavian ones.