Continuity and Innovation in Sweden in the 1970s

Neil Elder

Chapter 3 in Politics, Policy and the European Recession, 1982, pp 65-86 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Sweden, Denmark and Norway are unique in Western Europe in the degree of dominance enjoyed in their political systems by Social Democratic and Labour parties since the early 1930s. Among these three Scandinavian states that dominance was most marked in Sweden, where the Social Democrats held office almost without interruption from 1932 until 1976. A powerful factor in their initial success was the positive nature of their response to the crisis of the Great Depression. Instead of the fiscal orthodoxy and book-balancing exercises adopted, for example, by the Labour government of the time in Britain, the Social Democrats in Sweden put into practice the pre-Keynesian demand stimulation prescriptions of Wicksell and the Stockholm School of Economists. They thus offered hope at a time of depression. But the crucial factor in their success was that, as was the case elsewhere in Scandinavia during this period, they entered into partnership with the Agrarians in a Red-Green coalition on the basis of aid for the primary sector of the economy together with an expansion of welfare facilities. This horse-trading (Swedish, ‘cow-trading’) deal was a matter of the harmonisation of interests, scarcely of ideology, and both sides were experienced in hard bargaining through their comprehensive union, marketing and co-operative organisations.

Keywords: Labour Market; Inflationary Pressure; Indirect Taxation; Administrative Agency; Wage Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1982
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-05764-1_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349057641

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-05764-1_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().