🇩🇰 Denmark

Median age 42 looks comfortable until you notice youth unemployment nearly doubled from 9.1% to 11.9% in twelve months — the fastest deterioration in the Nordics. Denmark is a net receiving country for skilled EU labour (Poles, Romanians, Germans) but lacks Germany's industrial absorptive capacity, meaning imported labour plugs gaps in healthcare and IT rather than building long-run capacity. Old-age dependency at 32.8% is climbing toward German levels within a decade, and Denmark's TFR of ~1.7 means the demographic bill comes due whether or not AI delivers productivity gains to fund it.

Denmark has no coherent AI industrial strategy — it has a 'responsible AI' ethics framework inherited from EU harmonisation and a flexicurity system designed in the 1990s for blue-collar displacement. The government's response to AI is essentially 'more adult vocational training (AMU), more digitalisation of the public sector, and trust the model.' The Digital Strategy 2024-2027 mentions AI roughly forty times and commits to nothing specific on displacement, automation taxes, or labour market restructuring.