I read an article last week where Finnish Prime Minister, Alexander Stubb, blamed Apple for many of the country's recent economic woes. The gist of his argument was that Apple had crippled Nokia, the nation's largest private employer and as a result the Finnish economy has been on a steady decline for some time. He also blamed the economic decline on the Finnish paper industry, which is wholly unsurprising for a number of reasons.
I was fascinated that a single company could have such a huge economic footprint in a developed country in Western Europe so I decided to do a little digging. I was absolutely stunned to find that Nokia directly employed 22,000 Fins and indirectly employed another 20,000. At it's height the company also accounted for 1/5 of the country's total exports, 2/3 of the total value of their stock market value and it's $25 billion in sales was nearly equal to their entire national budget (which probably put a nice dent in Finnish tax revenue when they started declining.
I'm going to spend a little time researching to see if I can find any other country that is so reliant on a single private company as an engine of economic growth.