as discussed in chapter 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 million people nearly double the million oecd average table and figure regarding the regional level a government bill was presented to the parliament in april and put forward a proposal to reduce the number of counties from to plus oslo