As discussed in Chapter 1, while these individual regions are large (in population size) in their national context, they remain relatively small in the international arena - in fact, none of them gets close to the size of the average OECD region. However, when considered altogether, Western Scandinavia is almost twice as large as the typical OECD region - achieving a potential critical mass of more than 4.8 million people, nearly double the 2.3 million OECD average (Table 2.1 and Figure 2.1). Regarding the regional level, a government bill was presented to the parliament in April 2017 and put forward a proposal to reduce the number of counties from 19 to 10, plus Oslo.