The Secret Companies of Zug

Forget New York, London, and Washington, D.C. The greatest concentration of economic power in the world is in teeny tiny little Swiss town of Zug (pop. 115,000).

Well, at least on paper anyhow:

Zug canton — there are 26 cantons in Switzerland — is the small nation's smallest state, with just 115,000 people. Yet its commercial registry lists more than 29,000 companies — nearly one for every person in town — and more than 1,000 more companies arrive each year.

Why Zug? The good ol' Swiss secretive banking and ultra-efficient post office system:

[The companies'] "headquarters" exist entirely within the stolid post office building, whose hall holds thousands of P.O. boxes retained by foreign companies. "Many company names are not even on any door. They just have a post office box in Zug," says Rolf Schatzmann of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Zurich.

Vivienne Walt of TIME Magazine has the secret companies of Zug: Link


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Wow- James and Idil - please reread the summary. Zug is obviously the main town within the canton of Zug. Therefore there are 115,000 people in the canton, but only somewhere in the neighborhood of 29,000 people in the town of Zug. There exists territory within the canton that isn't in the city.

Another example is Aberdeenshire in Scotland. The shire consists of more than just the city of Aberdeen. Therefore, the shire's population is greater than the city's.
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