Social Policy And Welfare State In Sweden

Sweden has long been viewed as epitomizing a particular approach to economic and social policy. To its advocates, the Swedish welfare state builds on a strong social consensus favoring extensive state intervention to ensure a high quality of life for all Swedes. To its critics, the Swedish system is marked by excessive government intervention and attendant inefficiencies. These contrasting views are captured in imagery used by Prime Minister Göran Persson: "Think of a bumblebee. With its overly heavy body and little wings, supposedly it should not be able to fly--but it does." The Swedish welfare state is the bumblebee that has managed to fly. This book draws on many years of IMF surveillance and policy advice to explain how it has done so, to assess the challenges that the Swedish model faces in the new century, to propose a strategy for dealing with those challenges, and to draw lessons for the many other countries that face similar challenges from globalization and demographics.

Social Policy, Welfare State, and Civil Society in Sweden I-II gives a comprehensive account of the global invention of the welfare state, from the far north of the West to the global East and Southeast, and from its social policy origins to the most recent challenges from civil society. This first volume includes four essays, by now minor classics in welfare state literature. "Before Social Democracy: The Early Formation of a Social Policy Discourse in Sweden" set the stage for a research current that shifted from state welfare to welfare mix and civil society. "Working Class Power and the 1946 Pension Reform in Sweden" examined a key thesis in Peter Baldwin's seminal work The Politics of Social Solidarity, and led to a lively polemic among social historians. The third text was first published (as "Sweden") in volume 1 of Peter Flora's magnum opus Growth to Limits: The Western European Welfare States Since World War II. The final essay, "The Dialectics of Decentralization and Privatization," is a path-breaking study of the Swedish welfare state's reconstruction in the 1980s. The second volume covers the period since 1988 - "the lost world of social democracy" - and recent changes in comparative welfare state research and the Nordic Model. This work is an updated and enlarged edition in two volumes of Sven Hort's well-known and wide-ranging dissertation Social Policy and Welfare State in Sweden, published under the author's birth name Sven E. Olsson in 1990. This first volume contains the original four essays of the first edition. In praise of the new edition: "This is an impressive, comprehensive and knowledgeable contribution to the analysis of the early history and long-term development of the Swedish welfare state. Through a prime focus on reform actors at various stages we are persuasively reminded that there was a history before the ascendance of Social Democracy from the early 1930s, that the Social Democrats played a crucial role in the expansionary phase, and that one must go beyond theories of class politics to get a proper understanding of the evolution and characteristics of the modern welfare state." - Stein Kuhnle, Professor in Comparative Politics, Hertie School of Governance and University of Bergen "The development of the Swedish welfare state is often sketched in fairly simplistic terms. Professor Hort's analysis remains the most penetrating of the complex and fascinating interplay between politics, social forces, and economic development that explains much of the intricacies of the system that eventually emerged." - Gunnar Wetterberg, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Sven E. O. Hort is Professor in Social Welfare at the College of Social Sciences, Seoul National University, Korea. He is an alumnus of Lund University. In Sweden he taught sociology at Linneaus and Sodertorn universities. Currently he is the chief editor of the Swedish journal Arkiv. Tidskrift for samhallsanalys and a deputy editor of European Societies. With Stein Kuhnle he is the author of "The Coming of East and South-East Asian Welfare States," Journal of European Social Policy (2000)."

El autor hace un análisis histórico del desarrollo de la social democracia y la política social en Suecia a lo largo de la centuria 1880 a 1980y el papel que han desempeñado ambas en la actual situación del estado de bienestar y en la actual política social en dicho país.

Using an analytical framework based on Foucault's concept of governmentality and through unique case-studies, this volume explores the ongoing transformations taking place in the Swedish welfare state.

This book tackles a number of controversial questions regarding Swedenês economic and political development: «¾¾¾¾ How did Sweden become rich? «¾¾¾¾ How did Sweden become egalitarian? «¾¾¾¾ Why has Sweden since the early 1990s grown faster tha

"Virpi Timonen investigates both the changes that have taken place in central social policies in the areas of pensions, unemployment policies, social and health servcies, and the political and structural reasons for the pattern of policy change that emerged. A critical evaluation of the roles of globalization, political mechanisms and power relationships in shaping these social policies in Finland and Sweden is also featured.".

This book deals with the quest for a divided welfare state in Sweden. The prime example is the rapid rise of private health insurance, which now constitutes a parallel system characterized by state subsidies for some and not for others. This functions as a kind of reverse means-testing, whereby primarily the upper classes get state support for new types of welfare consumption. Innovatively, Lapidus explains how such a parallel system requires not only direct and statutory state support but also indirect support, for example, from infrastructure built for the public health system. He goes on to examine how semi-private welfare funding is dependent on private provision and how the so-called 'hidden welfare state' gradually erodes the visible and former universal welfare state model, in direct contrast to its own stated goals. Who benefits from privatized welfare? How are the privatization of delivery and the privatization of funding linked? How does this impact public willingness to pay tax? All of these questions and more are discussed in this accessible volume.