The Swedish third way: an assessment of the performance and validity of the Rehn-Meidner model

Wages, Income Distribution and Economic Growth: Long-Run Perspectives in Scandinavia, 1900–2010

“…32-41, 263-268). Second, the Scandinavian countries, with their strong trade unions and expansive welfare states in the postwar period, in fact saw the development of economic policy analyses that were quite different to the wage restraint paradigmespecially the famed Swedish Rehn-Meidner model of wage policy and economic policy (Ekdahl 2001;Erixon 2008Erixon , 2011Erixon , 2018. According to the trade union economists Rehn and Meidner, wage pressure would induce structural transformation and stimulate productivity growth; we provide a quantitative investigation of this argument.…”

“…This argument is very interesting in our context too because the Scandinavian countries also experienced a period of growing wage shares during the postwar years and then a fallback after 1980. It also corresponds with the Swedish wage bargaining model developed in the postwar period, the Rehn-Meidner model (Erixon 2008(Erixon , 2011(Erixon , 2018, which will be discussed in the next section. A limitation of this paper must be noted.…”

Expansion and Retrenchment of the Swedish Welfare State

“…Moreover, fiscal incentives were created to stimulate investment and thus private-sector employment creation. Another element of the model was the wage policy of solidarity, by which the only differences allowed between wages would be those related to the working environment and the nature of a given job (22, 23).…”

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

“…Large immigration to Sweden resulted in higher unemployment given the wage structure, the flexibility of the labour market and the prevalence of discrimination and language difficulties. It also seems that the deep recession and the restrictive economic policy of the 1991-1997 period had long-run effects on unemployment, particularly through hysteresis effects (Erixon 2008). In neo-Keynesian terms, Swedish economists emphasized that the negative demand shocks during the first half of the 1990s had long-run effect on Swedish unemployment; job security and high unemployment benefits led to wage rigidities, despite the reforms of the 1990s (Holmlund 2009, 119).…”

“…for example Finland, United Kingdom, South Korea and the United States) reflected wage increases in the higher income brackets that is, for skilled labour (cf Gustavsson 2007, Erixon 2008…”