The Rehn-Meidner model recommends active labor-market policies, tight macroeconomic policies and solidarity wage policies to combine price stability, growth, full employment and equity. The golden age for the model in Sweden began in the late 1950s and ended in the early 1970s. The following postwar period was characterized by obvious deviations from the Rehn-Meidner model but also by the survival of parts of the model. The rise and partial fall of the model in Sweden is explained by changes in political institutions, wage bargaining systems, trade union power, economic policy makers and economic thinking and by experiences of economic policy in the past. However, there is weak evidence that the departure from the Rehn-Meidner model is ultimately explained by globalization and new technologies.The Rehn-Meidner (R-M) model is a unique Swedish contribution to economics. The model represents a consistent "third way" between a Keynesian and a neoclassical or monetarist approach to economic policy. The means of the R-M model are also, together with the general welfare state, the cornerstones of the "Swedish model." Two trade union economists -Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner -advocated an active labor-market policy, a wage policy of solidarity and a restrictive macroeconomic policy to combine full employment with fair wages, price stability and high economic growth. The program was presented in a report to the 1951 congress of the Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), the central organization for blue-collar workers in Sweden. Rudolf Meidner was then the head of LO's research department and Gösta Rehn the department's leading macroeconomist. Lennart ErixonErixon (2008) analyzes the performance of the R-M model in Sweden and the validity of its underlying economic theory, and Erixon (2011) pinpoints the theoretical roots of the model. Erixon (2001) scrutinizes the relevance of the R-M wage and economic policy program; a similar evaluation today should have compared the R-M model with the Danish (or Dutch) flexicurity model recommended by the European Commission (of the European Union [EU]). Both models stress the importance of active labor-market policy and high unemployment benefits at the expense of legislation and agreements on job security. However, the Danish flexicurity model is commonly associated with decentralized wage negotiations and wage differentials between companies, thus not as the R-M model with coordinated wage bargaining and solidarity wage policy.The aim of the current paper is to complement earlier studies of the R-M model by disentangling the political-institutional and economic-structural conditions, policy priorities, power relations, technologies, economic paradigms and economic-policy experiences underlying the Swedish application of and subsequent departure from the model. Swedish economic policy was uniquely influenced by the R-M model but also by the conventional view of the model's performance. It is possible to speak of a "golden age" for the R-M ideas in Sweden from the late 1950s up ...

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Under the influence of traumatic events, new ideas, economic experts and the ICT revolution-the economic policy and macroeconomic performance of Sweden in the 1990s and 2000s*

JohanÅkerman and Erik Dahmén's institutional theory of economic fluctuations is a constructive alternative to traditional macroeconomic approaches and also to modern business-cycle analysis based on microeconomic optimization models. By its integration of a business-cycle and growth perspective,Åkerman and Dahmén's analysis was similar to that of Schumpeter in Business Cycles. But their notions of malinvestment, structural tensions, and development blocks provided an original explanation of the turning points in the business cycle. The Akerman-Dahmén approach is more valid for innovation-driven cycles such as the ICT boom in the late 1990s and the subsequent crisis than for cycles with an independent role of financial-market conditions. *