Sweden is #8 in terms of total tax wedge in the OECD. Norway is the 18th highest and just barely above the OECD average, compared to e.g. US at #25, Belgium at #1, Germany #2.
Sweden is high, but still 6-8 percentage points below Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, France, and about twice that beow Belgium, which is an extreme outlier.
...but the structure of the tax wedge is quite different. In Denmark, almost all of it comes from income tax while in other countries it's usually 40% paid by the employer...
That's a good point. I'm generally opposed to including payroll taxes when talking about tax for that reason, because what people tend to compare when talking about income, tends to be their contracted salary excluding anything paid by employers. If you then include payroll taxes when comparing tax, you should compared it income + payroll taxes as your "actual" gross income.
But when you discuss with people who want to quote high tax rates, they almost always include everything in order to try to get shockingly high numbers, which is why I now tend to use the OECD numbers because they too favour that, and their numbers still tend to come out far below what certain people like to think they pay (I was shocked at first to find out that there is a huge number of people out there that have no idea what their actual tax rates are, but just blindly go by the marginal rates and assume that's what they're paying...)
But of course that comparison also goes the other way if you try to compare against countries where the relative split is wildly different.
Sweden is high, but still 6-8 percentage points below Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, France, and about twice that beow Belgium, which is an extreme outlier.