Switzerland

"Switzerland may be neutral but it is certainly not flavorless. The fusion of German, French and Italian ingredients has formed a robust national culture, and the country's alpine landscapes have enough zing to reinvigorate the most jaded traveler.

Goethe summed up Switzerland succinctly as a combination of 'the colossal and the well-ordered'. You can be sure that your trains and letters will be on time. The tidy, just-so precision of Swiss towns is tempered by the lofty splendor of the landscapes that surround them.

Switzerland conjures up a fair swag of clichés: irresistible chocolates, yodeling Heidis, humorless bankers, international bureaucracies and an orderly, anally-retentive and rather bland national persona. But Harry Lime was wrong on more than one account when, in The Third Man, he said 500 years of Swiss democracy and peace had produced nothing more than the cuckoo clock. For a start, the Germans invented this monstrous timepiece; secondly, the Swiss, who are a brainy lot, have won more Nobel Prizes and registered more patents per capita than any other nation on earth." (lonelyplanet.com)

Full country name: Swiss Confederation
Area: 41,290 sq km
Population: 7.31 million
Capital City: Bern
People: 65% German, 18% French, 10% Italian, 1% Romansch, 6% other
Language: German, French, Italian, Raeto-Romance
Religion: 46.1% Roman Catholic, 40% Protestant, 5% other, 8.9% other.
Government: federal republic
Head of State: President Joseph Deiss
 

GDP: US$233.4 billion
GDP per capita: US$32,000
Annual Growth: 2%
Inflation: 2%
Major Industries: Banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, precision instruments, tourism
Major Trading Partners: EU (esp. Germany, France, Italy, UK), US, Japan
Member of EU: No

This web site was constructed for a school project. Information was taken from the credited sites along with information from search engines. We can be reached at lpierson1@ucok.edu.