of tourist arrivals. Visitors from abroad accounted for 4% of Swiss GDPin 2000. The Swiss themselves also like travelling, with France the most populardestination. From an industrial to a service sector societyMore and more large industrial buildings are empty, with the powerful industrialmachines at a standstill. Work is changing. More and more people only work with theirfingertips, pressing buttons: computer keyboards, push-button telephones. It is becomingless common to take hold of the things we produce. We work with software, not with"hard" things. We live more comfortably, but are also further removed from the origins ofthe things we need and consume daily.CompaniesMost businesses are small or medium-sized. In 1998, 99.7% of enterprises had fewer than250 full-time workers, employing nearly 70% of the total work force. The largestcompany is Nestl, the biggest food company in the world. At the end of 1999 it had231,000 employees, more than 97% of them outside Switzerland. In the Financial Times"Global 500" table for 2001, Switzerland came sixth. The table ranks the world'scompanies according to the value placed on them by stock markets. Switzerland had 11companies on the list, valued at a total of 584 billion dollars. Many Swiss enterprisescontinue to be run by the families which founded them. These include such giants as thepharmaceutical and biotech company Serono, headed by its biggest shareholder, ErnestoBertarelli, the son of its founder, and the Swatch group founded by Nicolas Hayek.Businesses in Switzerland have for many years been accused of cronyism by left winggroups. A very restricted number of people - estimated at about 100 - sit on the boards ofmany different companies, taking decisions with little reference to ordinary shareholders.With the growth of new communication technology and increasing globalisation,companies themselves have started to accept that their administration must become morecredible and transparent.E...
