Netherlands

Official name Koninkrijk der Nederlanden (Kingdom of the Netherlands)
Form of government constitutional monarchy with a parliament (States General) comprising two chambers (Senate [75]; House of Representatives [150])
Head of state Monarch: King Willem-Alexander
Head of government Prime Minister: Mark Rutte
Capital Amsterdam
Seat of government The Hague
Official language Dutch1
Official religion none
Monetary unit euro (€)
Population (2013 est.) 16,802,000COLLAPSE
Total area (sq mi) 16,158
Total area (sq km) 41,850
Urban-rural population

Urban: (2010) 82.9%

Rural: (2010) 17.1%

Life expectancy at birth

Male: (2012) 79.2 years

Female: (2012) 82.8 years

Literacy: percentage of population age 15 and over literate

Male: (2009) 100%

Female: (2009) 100%

GNI per capita (U.S.$) (2013) 47,440

1Frisian is officially recognized in Friesland but not legally codified by the national government.

Background of Netherlands

The Dutch United Provinces declared their independence from Spain in 1579; during the 17th century, they became a leading seafaring and commercial power, with settlements and colonies around the world. After a 20-year French occupation, a Kingdom of the Netherlands was formed in 1815. In 1830 Belgium seceded and formed a separate kingdom. The Netherlands remained neutral in World War I, but suffered invasion and occupation by Germany in World War II. A modern, industrialized nation, the Netherlands is also a large exporter of agricultural products. The country was a founding member of NATO and the EEC (now the EU) and participated in the introduction of the euro in 1999. In October 2010, the former Netherlands Antilles was dissolved and the three smallest islands - Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba - became special municipalities in the Netherlands administrative structure. The larger islands of Sint Maarten and Curacao joined the Netherlands and Aruba as constituent countries forming the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Netherlands, country located in northwestern Europe, also known as Holland. “Netherlands” means low-lying country; the name Holland (from Houtland, or “Wooded Land”) was originally given to one of the medieval cores of what later became the modern state and is still used for 2 of its 12 provinces (Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland). A parliamentary democracy under a constitutional monarch, the kingdom includes its former colonies in the Lesser Antilles: Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, and Sint Maarten. The capital is Amsterdam and the seat of government The Hague.

The country is indeed low-lying and remarkably flat, with large expanses of lakes, rivers, and canals. Some 2,500 square miles (6,500 square km) of the Netherlands consist of reclaimed land, the result of a process of careful water management dating back to medieval times. Along the coasts, land was reclaimed from the sea, and, in the interior, lakes and marshes were drained, especially alongside the many rivers. All this new land was turned into polders, usually surrounded by dikes. Initially, man power and horsepower were used to drain the land, but they were later replaced by windmills, such as the mill network at Kinderdijk-Elshout, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The largest water-control schemes were carried out in the second half of the 19th century and in the 20th century, when steam pumps and, later, electric or diesel pumps came into use.

Despite government-encouraged emigration after World War II, which prompted some 500,000 persons to leave the country, the Netherlands is today one of the world’s most densely populated countries. Although the population as a whole is “graying” rapidly, with a high percentage over age 65, Amsterdam has remained one of the liveliest centres of international youth culture. There, perhaps more than anywhere else in the country, the Dutch tradition of social tolerance is readily encountered. Prostitution, “soft-drug” (marijuana and hashish) use, and euthanasia are all legal but carefully regulated in the Netherlands, which was also the first country to legalize same-sex marriage.

This relative independence of outlook was evident as early as the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Dutch rejected monarchical controls and took a relatively enlightened view of other cultures, especially when they brought wealth and capital to the country’s trading centres. In that period Dutch merchant ships sailed the world and helped lay the foundations of a great trading country characterized by a vigorous spirit of enterprise. In later centuries, the Netherlands continued to have one of the most advanced economies in the world, despite the country’s modest size. The Dutch economy is open and generally internationalist in outlook. With Belgium and Luxembourg, the Netherlands is a member of the Benelux economic union, which in the 1950s and 1960s served as a model for the larger European Economic Community (EEC; now embedded in the European Union [EU]), of which the Benelux countries are members. The Netherlands is also a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and it plays host to a number of international organizations, especially in the legal sector, such as the International Court of Justice.

The Dutch reputation for tolerance was tested in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when an increase in immigration from non-European Union countries and a populist turn in politics resulted in growing nationalism and even xenophobia, marked by two race-related political assassinations, in 2002 and 2004, and the government’s requirement that immigrants pass an expensive ‘‘integration’’ test before they enter the country.

==Geography of Netherlands=='

The Land

Relief

The Netherlands is bounded by the North Sea to the north and west, Germany to the east, and Belgium to the south. If the Netherlands were to lose the protection of its dunes and dikes, the most densely populated part of the country would be inundated (largely by the sea but also in part by the rivers). This highly developed part of the Netherlands, which generally does not lie higher than about three feet (one metre) above sea level, covers more than half the total area of the country. About half of this area (more than one-fourth of the total area of the country) actually lies below sea level.

The lower area consists mainly of polders, where the landscape not only lies at a very low elevation but is also very flat in appearance. On such land, building is possible only on “rafts,” or after concrete piles, sometimes as long as 65 feet (20 metres), have been driven into the silt layer.

In the other, higher area, the layers of sand and gravel in the eastern part of the country were pushed sideways and upward in some places by ice tongues of the Saale Glacial Stage, forming elongated ridges that may reach a height of more than 330 feet (100 metres) and are the principal feature of the Hoge Park Veluwe National Park. The only part of the country where elevations exceed 350 feet (105 metres) is the border zone of the Ardennes. The Netherlands’ highest point, the Vaalserberg, in the extreme southeastern corner, rises to 1,053 feet (321 metres).

Drainage and dikes

The Zuiderzee was originally an estuary of the Rhine River. By natural action it then became a shallow inland sea, biting deep into the land, and eventually it was hollowed into an almost circular shape by the action of winds and tides. In 1920 work was begun on the Zuiderzee project, of which the IJsselmeer Dam (Afsluitdijk), begun in 1927, was a part. This 19-mile- (30-km-) long dam was completed in 1932 to finally seal off the Zuiderzee from the Waddenzee and the North Sea. In the IJsselmeer, or IJssel Lake, formed from the southern part of the Zuiderzee, four large polders, the IJsselmeer Polders, with a total area of about 650 square miles (1,700 square km), were constructed around a freshwater basin fed by the IJssel and other rivers and linked with the sea by sluices and locks in the barrier dam.

The first two polders created there—Wieringermeer and North East (Noordoost) Polder, drained before and during World War II—are used mostly for agriculture. The two polders reclaimed in the 1950s and ’60s—South Flevoland Polder (Zuidelijk) and East Flevoland Polder (Oostelijk)—are used for residential, industrial, and recreational purposes. Among the cities that have developed there are Lelystad and Almere.

In the southwest, the disastrous gales and spring tide of Feb. 1, 1953, which flooded some 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) of land and killed 1,800 people, accelerated the implementation of the Delta Project, which aimed to close off most of the sea inlets of the southwestern delta. These delta works were designed to shorten the coastline by 450 miles (725 km), combat the salination of the soil, and allow the development of the area through roads that were constructed over 10 dams and 2 bridges built between 1960 and 1987. The largest of these dams, crossing the five-mile- (eight-km-) wide Eastern Schelde (Oosterschelde) estuary, has been built in the form of a storm-surge barrier incorporating dozens of openings that can be closed in the event of flood. The barrier is normally open, allowing salt water to enter the estuary and about three-fourths of the tidal movement to be maintained, limiting damage to the natural environment in the Eastern Schelde. In the interest of the commerce of the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp, no dams were constructed in the New Waterway, which links Rotterdam to the North Sea, or the West Schelde, an approach to Antwerp, Belg. The dikes along these waterways consequently had to be strengthened.

A region with a very specific character has been formed by the great rivers—Rhine, Lek, Waal, and Maas (Meuse)—that flow from east to west through the central part of the country. The landscape in this area is characterized by high dikes along wide rivers, orchards along the levees formed by the rivers, and numerous large bridges over which pass the roads and railways that connect the central Netherlands with the southern provinces.

Soils

In the late Pleistocene Epoch (from about 126,000 to 11,700 years ago), the Scandinavian ice sheet covered the northern half of the Netherlands. After this period, a large area in the north of what is now the Netherlands was left covered by moraine (glacial accumulation of earth and rock debris). In the centre and south, the Rhine and Maas rivers unloaded thick layers of silt and gravel transported from the European mountain chains. Later, during the Holocene Epoch (i.e., the past 11,700 years), clay was deposited in the sheltered lagoons behind the coastal dunes, and peat soil often subsequently developed in these areas. If the peat soil was washed away by the sea or dug away by humans (for the production of fuel and salt), lakes were created. Many of these were reclaimed in later centuries (as mentioned above), while others now form highly valued outdoor recreational areas.

Climate

The climate of the Netherlands is temperate, with gentle winters, cool summers, and rainfall in every season. Southerly and westerly winds predominate, and the sea moderates the climate through onshore winds and the effect of the Gulf Stream.

The position of the country—between the area of high-pressure air masses centred on the Azores and the low-pressure region centred on Iceland—makes the Netherlands an area of collision between warm and polar air masses, thus creating unsettled weather. Winds meet with little resistance over the flat country, though the hills in the south significantly diminish the velocity of the potent wind that prevails along the coast. On average, frost occurs 60 days per year. July temperatures average about 63 °F (17 °C), and those of January average 35 °F (2 °C). Annual rainfall averages about 31 inches (790 mm), with only about 25 clear days per year. The average rainfall is highest in summer (August) and autumn and lowest in springtime. The country is known—not least through the magnificent landscapes of Dutch painters—for its heavy clouds, and on an average day three-fifths of the sky is clouded.

Plant and animal life

Most wild Dutch plant species are of the Atlantic district within the Euro-Siberian phytogeographic region. Gradients of salt and winter temperature variations cause relatively minor zonal differences in both wild and garden plants from the coast to more continental regions. The effects of elevation are negligible. Vegetation from coastal sand dunes, muddy coastal areas, slightly brackish lakes, and river deltas is especially scarce in the surrounding countries. Lakes, marshes, peatland, woods, heaths, and agricultural areas determine the general floral species. Clay, peat, and sand are important soil factors for the inland vegetation regions.

Animal life is relegated by region according to vegetation. Seabirds and other sea life, such as mollusks, are found especially in the muddy Waddenzee area and in the extreme southwest. Migrating birds pass in huge numbers through the Netherlands or remain for a summer or winter stay. Species of waterbirds and marsh and pasture birds are numerous. Larger mammals, such as roe deer, red deer, foxes, and badgers, are mostly restricted to nature reserves. Some species, such as boars, beavers, fallow deer, mouflons, and muskrats, have been introduced locally or reintroduced. Some reptiles and amphibians are endangered. Numerous species of river fish and river lobsters have become scarce because of water pollution. There is a diversity of brackish and freshwater animals inhabiting the many lakes, canals, and drainage ditches, but the vulnerable species of the nutritionally deficient waters have become rare.

Nature reserves have been formed by governmental and private organizations. Well-known reserves include the Naardermeer of Amsterdam, the Hoge Veluwe National Park, and the Oostvaardersplassen in the centre of the country. Some endangered species are protected by law.

Demography of Netherlands

The People

• Ethnic groups

Popular belief holds that the Dutch are a mixture of Frisians, Saxons, and Franks. In fact, research has made plausible the contention that the autochthonous inhabitants of the region were a mixture of pre-Germanic and Germanic population groups who in the course of time had converged on the main deltaic region of western Europe. There emerged from these groups in the 7th and 8th centuries some major polities based on certain ethnic and cultural unities that then came to be identified as Frisians, Saxons, and Franks.

The Dutch Republic originated from medieval statelets, and its legal successor, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has attracted countless immigrants through the centuries. A strong impetus was the principle of freedom of thought, which engendered the relative tolerance that developed in the 16th and 17th centuries. These sentiments were—and are—most manifest in the prosperous commercial and industrial centres in the western provinces, which attracted many members of persecuted religious or political minorities. Among these were southern lowlanders, French Huguenots, and Portuguese Jews, along with many people who sought to improve their economic situation, such as Germans and non-Iberian Jews. In the 20th century, immigrants from the former Dutch overseas colonies added to the influx; they included Indonesians and peoples from the Moluccas and from Suriname on the northeast coast of South America. In recent decades, however, as Muslims from Turkey and Morocco arrived in large numbers, Dutch embracement of diversity has been more tenuous. At the beginning of the 21st century, not only did a virulent anti-immigrant movement emerge, but also the government required that immigrants pass a test in their country of origin relating to Dutch language and culture before they were allowed to enter the Netherlands.

• Languages

The language in the whole of the country is Dutch, sometimes referred to as Netherlandic, a Germanic language that is also spoken by the inhabitants of northern Belgium (where it is called Flemish). Afrikaans, an official language of South Africa, is a variant of the Dutch spoken by 17th-century emigrants from the Holland and Zeeland regions. Apart from Dutch, the inhabitants of the northern province of Friesland also speak their own language (called Frisian in English), which is closer to English than to either Dutch or German. In the major cities especially, many people are fluent in several languages, reflecting the country’s geographic position, its history of occupation, and its attraction for tourists. English, French, and German are among the languages commonly heard.

In terms of formal allegiance, the present Dutch population can be divided into three almost equal groups relative to religion: Roman Catholics (the southern provinces of Limburg and Noord-Brabant are traditionally almost monolithically Catholic, but in terms of absolute numbers more Catholics live north of the great rivers than in Noord-Brabant and Limburg), Protestants (particularly the adherents to the Netherlands Reformed Church), and the nonreligious. The adherents of Islam have developed a wide range of institutions in the Netherlands and constituted about 6 percent of the population at the turn of the 21st century.

Secularization has made its mark in the Netherlands; the Christian Democrat parties of the centre, whose political platform included planks such as public funding for religious education, had attracted more than 50 percent of the vote up to the 1960s, but in the 1990s they were ejected from government for the first time in the 20th century. Nonetheless, the educational institutions and political parties that evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries along denominational lines remain as potent as the more or less secularized parties and institutions that sprang from socialist and liberal movements. The “pillarization” of Dutch society—that is, the founding of separate institutions such as hospitals, schools, and periodicals by various groups—commands much less religiosity and devotion now, but these organizations are still central to education, political life, and public service.

These more or less converging societal groupings have not completely obliterated a range of age-old regional cultural distinctions. They are sometimes vividly preserved, as in the case of the northern province of Friesland, which proudly conserves the ancient Frisian culture. With more-recent immigration, new cultural groups are becoming significant.

• Settlement patterns

Modern urbanization in the Netherlands took place mainly in the 20th century. In 1900 more than half the population was still living in villages or towns of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. A century later this proportion had decreased to about one-tenth. There has, nevertheless, been a decrease in the city-proper populations of the large metropolitan centres. These inner cities are now becoming economic and cultural centres, their populations having spread outward in search of newer housing and greater living space in suburbs, new residential quarters of rural settlements, and new towns. In the 1960s and ’70s the authorities stimulated this development by subsidizing house building in a number of so-called growth nuclei and by moving several groupings of public offices from the western core area of the country to more-rural areas in the north, east, and south. More recently, however, government planning policy has aimed at again concentrating the population in and around the existing cities, especially in the western portion of the country.

In this part of the Netherlands, the bulk of the population is concentrated in the horseshoe-shaped urban core known as the Randstad (“Rim City,” or “City on the Edge”), comprising such cities as Rotterdam, The Hague, Leiden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Hilversum, and Utrecht. Extensions of the Randstad stretch toward the east (Arnhem, Nijmegen) and the south (Breda, Tilburg, Eindhoven), thus forming the so-called Central Netherlands Urban Ring. Other urban centres are Groningen in the northeast, Enschede and Hengelo in the east, and Maastricht and Heerlen in the southeast. It is government policy to keep traditional towns and cities separated by strips of agricultural or recreational land.

• Demographic trends

Exceptionally high fertility rates until the 1960s contributed to the Netherlands’ being one of the world’s most densely populated countries. Since then, trends have shifted, owing mainly to wider use of birth control pills (a consequence of growing secularization) and to the increased participation of women in higher education and the workforce. At the beginning of the 21st century, Dutch birth and death rates were both among the world’s lowest, resulting in a somewhat older society, with most population growth arising from immigration.

Emigrants exceeded immigrants by an average of almost 20,000 each year from 1947 to 1954. Thereafter the economy and labour potential of the more industrialized European countries attracted an increasing number of labour migrants from southern Europe, Turkey, and Morocco, so that the balance of in-migration and out-migration remained more or less static. From 1970 there was a continuous immigrant surplus, and in the early 21st century, one-fifth of the Netherlands’ population was made up of residents born abroad or with at least one foreign-born parent. In the late 1990s, with most other doors to immigration closed by government policy and the possibility of entry for family reunification largely expended, the numbers of applications for asylum were high. There was also an increase in the immigration of Dutch nationals from the Netherlands Antilles. Following legislation in 2001 that further tightened immigration restrictions, the annual number of asylum seekers fell, but the issue of immigration remained on the political forefront.

For many years prior to 1970, internal migration showed a constant flow from the more rural provinces in the north, east, and south toward the more strongly urbanized western part of the country. After 1970, however, the trend toward migration to the west was reversed. Subsequent emigration was mainly from Zuid-Holland and Noord-Holland (the most heavily populated provinces) toward Utrecht and the less densely populated provinces, where government regional policy stimulated industrial growth—Groningen, Friesland, Drenthe, Gelderland, and Zeeland.

Economy of Netherlands

Since World War II, the Netherlands has been a highly industrialized country occupying a central position in the economic life of western Europe. Although agriculture accounts for a small percentage of the national income and labour force, it remains a highly specialized contributor to Dutch exports. Because of the scarcity of mineral resources—with the important exception of natural gas—the country is dependent on large imports of basic materials.

The Netherlands has a market economy, but the state traditionally has been a significant participant in such fields as transportation, resource extraction, and heavy industry. The government also employs a substantial percentage of the total labour force and effects investment policy. Nonetheless, during the 1980s, when the ideological climate favoured market economics, considerable privatization was initiated, government economic intervention was reduced, and the welfare state was restructured. State-owned companies such as DSM (Dutch State Mines) and KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) were among those privatized. Nonetheless, the Netherlands has, relatively speaking, a highly regulated mixed economy.

Since World War II, economic development has been consciously stimulated by government policy, and state subsidies have been granted to attract industry and services toward the relatively underdeveloped north and certain other pockets of economic stagnation. Despite these subsidies, the western part of the country remains the centre of new activity, especially in the service sector.

• Agriculture

The country’s agricultural land is divided into grassland, arable farmland, and horticultural land. Dutch dairy farming is highly developed; the milk yield per acre of grassland and the yield per cow are among the highest in the world. A good percentage of the total milk production is exported after being processed into such dairy products as butter, cheese, and condensed milk. Meat and eggs are produced in intensively farmed livestock holdings, where enormous numbers of pigs, calves, and poultry are kept in large sheds and fed mainly on imported fodder. Most cereals for human consumption as well as fodder are imported.

Horticulture carried on under glass is of special importance. The export of hothouse tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, cut flowers, and houseplants has greatly increased, and the Netherlands now contains a substantial share of the total European horticultural area under glass. Open-air horticulture also produces fruit, vegetables, cut flowers, and bulbs, the latter from the world-famous colourful bulb fields. Only one-tenth of the land is forested. The Dutch fishing industry, while not large, is nevertheless significant. At the beginning of the 21st century, three-fourths of the fish consumed in the Netherlands was foreign-caught, yet about four-fifths of the total catch was exported. As a result, the country is unusual in exporting more fish than it imports.

• Resources and power

With the increasing use of oil and especially natural gas, coal mining (concentrated in the southeast) was discontinued in 1974 because of the rising cost of production. The Netherlands imports several million tons of coal annually to meet domestic and industrial needs, including those of such industrial installations as the steel works of IJmuiden at the mouth of the North Sea Canal.

The production of crude oil, of which there are minimal deposits, covers only a small part of Dutch requirements. The wells are located near Schoonebeek, in the northeast, and in the southwest. Large amounts of crude oil are imported for refining in the Netherlands, and much of the refined petroleum is exported.

The discovery of natural gas in 1959 had a tremendous influence on the development of the Dutch economy. The gas fields are in the northeastern Netherlands—with the largest field at Slochteren—and beneath the Dutch sector of the North Sea. Under the Geneva Convention of 1958, the Netherlands was allocated a 22,000-square-mile (57,000-square-km) block of the continental shelf of the North Sea, an area larger than the country itself. Technological advances led to an increase in offshore production in the last decades of the 20th century. One-third of the natural gas produced is exported, primarily to countries of the European Union (EU), helping to improve the balance of payments in the economic sector—in which the Netherlands has usually had its largest deficit. The natural gas discoveries began a trend in Dutch industries toward greater use of domestically produced fuel.

One of the results of the reliance on gas is that nuclear power is very limited in the Netherlands. On the other hand, the flat maritime landscape is well suited to the use of wind turbines, which are increasingly employed in agricultural areas. Among the country’s other resources are zinc, extracted at Budel, sodium at Delfzijl, and magnesium at Veendam.

• Manufacturing

Modern Dutch industrial development began relatively late, about 1870, and production rose even during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Further development became a priority after World War II, when ascending population figures and growing farm-labour surpluses necessitated the creation of tens of thousands of jobs each year. Manufacturing industries accounted for about one-fifth of the labour force in the early 21st century but only about one-eighth of production value. Important components of the manufacturing sector include food and beverages, metal, chemical, petroleum products, and electrical and electronics industries. Textile manufacturing, shipbuilding, and aircraft construction were important historically, but employment in those sectors has greatly declined. The government has encouraged new industrial development in the fields of microelectronics, biotechnology, and the so-called digital economy.

• Finance, trade, and services

Commercial banking in the Netherlands is in the hands of a few large concerns, and there has been a trend toward mergers of banks and insurance companies over several decades. The state-owned Netherlands Central Bank supervises the banking system. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange, one of the oldest in the world, was founded in the early 1600s.

Trade is conducted mainly with Europe and North America. The member states of the EU are the Netherlands’ dominant trading partners, receiving three-fourths of Dutch exports and providing one-half of the country’s imports. In 1958 (just as the Common Market was established) some 40 percent of Dutch exports went to West Germany (now Germany), Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Italy. By the beginning of the 21st century, the main trading partners were Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the United States, Russia, and China. In the same period, the service industry accounted for about seven-tenths of the labour force and about two-thirds of gross domestic product (GDP), with tourism playing a vital role. The most frequent foreign visitors are Germans, Britons, Americans, and Belgians.

• Labour and taxation

Dutch employers are organized mainly in separate but closely cooperating organizations: one Roman Catholic and Protestant and one nondenominational. The labour force had a tripartite organization before the Socialist and Roman Catholic unions merged as Netherlands Trade Union Federation (Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging; FNV), leaving the Protestant union, the National Federation of Christian Trade Unions (Christelijk Nationaal Vakverbond; CNV), and a few small independent organizations far behind in membership. Employer organizations and labour unions are represented on the Joint Industrial Labour Council, established in 1945 for collective bargaining, and on the Social and Economic Council, which serves mainly to advise the government. These corporatist arrangements were substantially deregulated in the 1980s as neoliberal, market-oriented policies were carried out. Socioeconomic planning remains extremely important, however, and the Central Planning Bureau’s economic models are integral to all forms of economic policy.

The Dutch government uses both direct and indirect taxation to finance its extensive welfare programs. In 1969 it began levying a value-added tax (VAT). In addition to a graduated personal income tax, there is also a property tax, a motor vehicle tax, an excise tax on certain products, an energy tax, and a tax on legal transactions.

• Transportation and telecommunications

In the Netherlands transportation is of special importance because the country functions as a gateway for the traffic of goods between western Europe and the rest of the world. (Amsterdam, for example, has been the centre of diamond exchange for centuries.) Trade flows through Dutch harbours, continuing its passage by riverboat, train, truck, and pipeline. Maritime traffic accounts for more than half the total amount of goods loaded and unloaded in the Netherlands, and, indeed, the whole southern part of the North Sea may be likened to an immense traffic square, fed by the Thames, Rhine, Maas, and Schelde rivers, with links into the hinterland of the continent that make it one of the greatest commercial arteries of the world. Rotterdam has the country’s best-equipped modern harbour, the largest on the continent. Europoort, the region between Rotterdam and the North Sea, can easily be reached by the biggest oceangoing ships; it serves as an approach via the New Waterway Canal to Rotterdam harbour. For some 40 years, until it was eclipsed by busier Asian ports in the early 21st century, Rotterdam handled more tonnage than any other harbour in the world. In petroleum processing too, Rotterdam is one of the world’s leading centres, with facilities to receive the largest supertankers. The number of rivercraft is probably unsurpassed by any other country.

Other important ports, though dwarfed by Rotterdam-Europoort, are Amsterdam and, on the Western Schelde, Flushing and Terneuzen. KLM initiated scheduled service between Amsterdam and London in 1920 and became one of the world’s leading airlines, merging with Air France in 2004 to form Air France-KLM. Amsterdam Airport (Schiphol)—on the site of the former Haarlem Lake at about 13 feet (4 metres) below sea level—is among Europe’s largest airports. Smaller airports of international importance are Rotterdam (Zestienhoven), Eindhoven, and Maastricht.

In terms of internal traffic, motor vehicles, accommodated by a comprehensive road network, dominate both passenger and goods transport, despite the fact that there is a dense modern railway network. Dutch road haulage companies are market leaders and constitute a large slice of such business in the EU. Moreover, Dutch shipping companies handle about two-fifths of the EU’s freight transport by water. The Netherlands’ network of inland waterways, made up of some 3,000 miles (4,800 km) of rivers and canals, is linked with Belgian, French, and German systems. Besides such natural waterways as the Rhine, Lek, Waal, and Maas rivers, many artificial waterways—the Juliana Canal, the Amsterdam-Rhine River Canal (between Amsterdam and Tiel), the Maas-Waal Canal (west of Nijmegen), and others—connect the major ports on the coast with the hinterland.

The telecommunications system in the Netherlands is highly advanced, with extensive fibre-optic and mobile networks. Per capita cell phone usage in the Netherlands is comparable to that of most western European countries (though considerably less pervasive than in Scandinavia); per capita personal computer use is high by western European standards.

Disclaimer

This is not the official site of this country. Most of the information in this site were taken from the U.S. Department of State, The Central Intelligence Agency, The United Nations, [1],[2], [3], [4], [5],[6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14],[15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24],[25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30],[31], [32], [33], [34], and the [35].

Other sources of information will be mentioned as they are posted.