Why Don’t All EU Citizens Move to Nordic Countries?

Nordic countries are supposed to be the best countries in the world, and the EU offers free movement of people, so why doesn’t everybody move to the Nordics?

I recently saw this question and thought it would be interesting question to attempt to answer. While I am a Norwegian and currently live in Norway, I have lived in other countries abroad. So have many of my family members, including my wife. Thus I feel I have some unique ability to compare as the experiences of living in different countries is something we often discuss in my family.

I hope to be able to illuminate this question while giving those who might consider moving to the Nordic region, specifically Norway, a sense of what they gain and what they have to sacrifice to live here.

Are Nordic Countries Really That Great?

We should examine the premise of the question, which is that Nordic countries are as great as people claim. This claim has merit:

From 2013 until today, every time the World Happiness Report (WHR) has published its annual ranking of countries, the five Nordic countries — Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland — have all been in the top ten

The observation that Nordic countries kept topping the rankings forced the World Happiness Report to actually attempt to understand why these countries kept staying at the top year after year. Thus they produced a report called The Nordic Exceptionalism: What Explains Why the Nordic Countries Are Constantly Among the Happiest in the World.

If you really want to understand why Nordic countries are good to live in, you might want to read it. It is actually quite well written. I think most Nordic people can agree with most of what it states. Nordic countries have also tended to dominate the UN Human Development Index.