“Jacob, I can see that for you being a Wallenberg means never having to say you’re sorry.” I said coldly to the young intern, who had just made a complete mess of a mailing and was blaming my excellent assistant for the disaster.

 It was a good line – paraphrased from the 1970 movie “Love Story”– but it was a bad career move. It ended any hopes I may have had for a career at the top of Swedish industry, because that intern was the heir to the Wallenberg family, which owns minority but controlling interests in many top Swedish companies.

 And now, 30 years later, Jacob Wallenberg is boss of the industrial empire.

 People think of Sweden as a heavily Socialist country with very high taxes and few rich people, and assume that Swedish industry must lack ambition and innovation.

 But right now Sweden has the best “country yield”—the dividend yield of a basket of a country’s top corporations—than any company on the European continent.  The iShares MSCI Sweden Fund (NYSE:EWD) currently yields a generous 3.7%.

That’s not as high as the yield of our two Global Income Edge portfolios, but it’s impressive given the 1.8% yield on the Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index, and it’s from a country whose economy is growing faster than the U.S. economy. And at 16 times trailing earnings, it’s reasonably priced. Not bad for a “socialist paradise,” as Sweden is sometimes called.

 For two reasons, there’s a lot more to the Swedish economy than meets the eye.

 First, since the 1930s the Wallenbergs, a capable and aggressive dynasty, have controlled much of Swedish industry (through charitable foundations). Second, since a financial crisis in the early 1990’s, tax and other reforms have made even the non-Wallenberg sectors of Swedish industry much more capitalist. Because of this the top Swedish rate of income tax, once well over 70%, is now down to 56%, when you add in municipal taxes. The country still has a large state sector, at 52% of GDP, but that’s smaller than France’s, for example.

 Charitable foundations, holding companies and two-tier voting structures are the key to continued Wallenberg control in an era of high taxation. Since foundations, being charitable, don’t pay tax, Wallenberg control is preserved. The family can’t wander around the world on gigantic yachts like billionaires who own their assets directly, but they still live pretty well.

 Wallenberg family domination has on the whole been good for Swedish industry. Marcus Wallenberg (1899-1982) was a business genius, and while Peter Wallenberg, the intermediate generation’s leader, was a bit lazy, I have to admit through gritted teeth that Jacob, the current boss, is at least capable, and takes a useful, long-term view.

 To be fair, the last 20 years of Sweden’s economic opening have reduced Wallenberg domination. Of the top ten holdings of the iShares MSCI Sweden Fund (NYSE:EWD), which invests to match the MSCI Sweden Index, only four (L.M. Ericsson, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, Atlas Copco and Volvo AB) are now controlled partially or wholly by the Wallenbergs. Of the other six, three are banks, with the largest, Nordea, a primarily Norwegian bank that is now dominant in the Scandinavian region. The other three are Hennes & Mauritz, Sweden’s largest retailer, Assa Abloy, the world’s largest lock manufacturer, and Teliasonera, a merger of the Swedish and Finnish privatized telecom companies.

Sweden’s economy is doing pretty well, which is to say very well by European standards these days.  The International Monetary Fund projects 3% growth for 2014 and 3.3% growth for 2015, third fastest among the 28 countries in the EU, just behind Ireland and Poland. As with the United Kingdom, maintaining its own currency has helped Sweden’s economy by letting the country steer clear of the Euro’s instability. In most respects the Swedish economy resembles Germany’s, with a heavy orientation towards specialty manufacturing and a high level of engineering skill and product quality.

The iShare Sweden fund’s high yield results from an important cultural difference: Swedish top managers are less well paid than U.S. CEOs, and don’t receive such generous stock options; so they remain more shareholder-oriented, paying out more earnings in dividends rather than share buybacks.

Given its merits for yield, growth and international diversification, the iShares MSCI Sweden Fund is an good place for income-oriented U.S. investors to place a portion of their money.