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Stamps of Sweden |
Sweden's stamp issuing policy has been fairly restrained, though in recent years Sweden has issued over 50 designs a year. Subjects mostly center on Swedish themes. An Elvis Presley stamp, included in a 2004 set commemorating 50 years of Rock-n-Roll music, was a rare exception. (The other six stamps of the set featured Swedish Rock musicians.) There are two official sites with information about ordering Swedish new issues: Posten, in Sweden; and Unicover - the official North American Stamp Agency.
 Sweden is fortunate to have nearby warm gulf currents which keep its climate moderate—comparable to New York state—despite the country's extreme northern lattitude. Food production is high, providing roughly 80% of its inhabitants' needs, and Sweden devotes only about 2% of its workforce to agriculture. Heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers, however, have created environmental problems similar to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Most of its food is grown in Southern Sweden, with Skåne county, situated on the southernmost tip of the Scandinavian penninsular, accounting for nearly half of all of Sweden's food production.
 The Swedish inventor of dynamite, Afred Nobel, provided in his will that much of his $9 million estate be set aside in a trust fund invested in safe securities, the interest from which were to fund annual prizes awared to the most outstanding contributers to the fields of physics, physiology or medicine, chemistry, literature and peace. In 1968, the national bank of Sweden funded a sixth prize—in Economics—in memory of Afred Nobel. Today each prize is worth about $1.3 million. The stamp shown is one of a set of five released in 2001 to mark the centennial of the first awards. Each year since 1961 Sweden issues a set of stamps picturing the recipients of the Nobel Prize awarded 60 years before.
 Dag Hammarskjold is honored on this stamp issued in 2005, the 100th year after his birth. Mr. Hammarskjold was the Secretery-General of the United Nations from 1953 to 1961, just the second person to hold that post. He died in 1961 in a plane crash while trying to avert racial warfare in the Congo. His father was the Prime Minister of Sweden during World War I.
 During the last third of the nineteenth century there was a mass emigration from Sweden. Driven by food shortages and harsh economic conditions, more than a million Swedes left Sweden to seek a better life, a large percentage settling in the United States. This 1982 stamp depicts a departure scene in 1880. Today, people have been pouring into Sweden. The Wikipedia article (see link at upper left) states that "about one fifth of Sweden's population are either immigrants or the children of immigrants." Many of these are political refugees from Finland, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and the United States (deserters from the Vietnam War).
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