Excursion in Reality - The Nordic Model Revisited

Juha Honkatukia and Eeva Reissell

No 332974, Conference papers from Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project

Abstract: Nordic countries have for a long time appeared at the top of global happiness and welfare comparisons. They combine this achievement with high scores in economic performance. This marvel may be due to shared history and culture, but it also manifests itself as a largely publicly financed welfare state in an otherwise liberal market economy – the Nordic Model. In reality, many aspects of the model have been drastically reformed in the past two decades. The welfare sectors themselves have in most Nordic countries been quite cost-effective according to international comparisons, but ageing of the population is expected to raise costs in all of these countries. In Denmark and Sweden, much of the emphasis has been in reforming the labor markets, while Norway, with its enormous oil wealth, is apparently mostly focusing on keeping Dutch disease at bay. Finland is about to start the biggest policy reform of her post-war history that re-shapes both the funding and organization of her health care and social service sectors, and has effects on the centralization of decision-making and, fundamentally, the welfare of the citizenry. The full extent of the reform is yet to be defined, but it is clear that it will result in a geographically more concentrated, if also more de-regulated, provision of many welfare services. This paper studies the aspects of centralization of specialised health care on the one hand, and the more cost-efficient provision of care for the elderly using a regional CGE model of Finland.

Keywords: Labor; and; Human; Capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/332974/files/8957.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:pugtwp:332974

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Conference papers from Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().