Sweden's history from a poor rural country in the periphery of Europe to a modern welfare state is told in this book along with an analysis of contemporary extremes in culture, morals and government. The Swedish Story is written for non-Swedish readers to explain how the inner workings of welfare state and post-modern values pan out in everyday lives of Swedish citizens. The aim of the book is to start a discussion about how Sweden may become more mainstrean, more European and less extreme.

This short book explores Sweden’s response to the global pandemic and the wave of controversies it triggered. It helps to make sense of the response by defining ‘a Swedish model’ that incorporates the country’s value system and offers a case study for understanding the ways in which different national approaches to the pandemic have been compared.

In The Swedish Experiment Assar Lindbeck characterizes the economic and social system in Sweden in terms of a number of institutional features by which Sweden has differed from most other developed countries. They refer mainly to the division of responsibilities between the private and the government sector, in particular with respect to economic security, employment, income distribution, consumption and investment. The book concludes by asking whether the Swedish experiment is gradually unwinding and, if so, why. The Swedish Experiment is written in a nontechnical fashion and should be of great interest not only to professional economists, but also to students of economics and other social sciences as well as to general readers.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the spring of 2020, as a new and deadly virus rapidly spread across the globe, the world shut down. But a small country in Northern Europe remained open. First, its government instituted no restrictions. Then, it didn’t order the wearing of face masks. While the rest of the world looked on with incredulity, condemnation, admiration, and even envy, a small country in Northern Europe stood alone. As Covid-19 spread across the globe rapidly, the world shut down. But Sweden remained open. The Swedish Covid-19 strategy was alternately lauded and held up as a cautionary tale by international governments and journalists alike — with all eyes on what has been dubbed ‘The Swedish Experiment’. But what made Sweden take such a different path? And did it work? In The Herd, journalist Johan Anderberg narrates this improbable story, guiding the reader through the history and practice of epidemiology, and the ticking-clock decisions that Sweden's pandemic-response decision-makers were faced with on a daily basis. Weaving past and present effortlessly, Anderberg has written a real-life thriller about a nation dealing differently with a global crisis.

A large central government providing numerous public services has long been a hallmark of Swedish society, which is also well-known for its pursuit of equality. Yet in the 1990s, Sweden moved away from this tradition in education, introducing market-oriented reforms that decentralized authority over public schools and encouraged competition between private and public schools. Many wondered if this approach would improve educational quality, or if it might expand inequality that Sweden has fought so hard to hold down. In The Market Comes to Education in Sweden, economists Anders Björklund, Melissa Clark, Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson, and Alan Krueger measure the impact of Sweden's bold experiment in governing and help answer the questions that societies across the globe have been debating as they try to improve their children's education. The Market Comes to Education in Sweden injects some much-needed objectivity into the heavily politicized debate about the effectiveness of educational reform. While advocates for reform herald the effectiveness of competition in improving outcomes, others suggest that the reforms will grossly increase educational inequality for young people. The authors find that increased competition did help improve students' math and language skills, but only slightly, and with no effect on the performance of foreign-born students and those with low-educated parents. They also find some signs of increasing school segregation and wider inequality in student performance, but nothing near the doomsday scenarios many feared. In fact, the authors note that the relationship between family background and school performance has hardly budged since before the reforms were enacted. The authors conclude by providing valuable recommendations for school reform, such as strengthening school evaluation criteria, which are essential for parents, students, and governments to make competent decisions regarding education. Whether or not the market-oriented reforms to Sweden's educational system succeed will have far reaching implications for other countries considering the same course of action. The Market Comes to Education in Sweden offers firm empirical answers to the questions raised by school reform and brings crucial facts to the debate over the future of schooling in countries across the world.

This book considers Sweden’s pandemic management which differed so significantly from much of the rest of the world: it provoked intense and wide-reaching interest, curiosity and criticism. Trans-disciplinary Swedish authors from the humanities, life sciences, social sciences, and cultural studies use a variety of tools to mine deeper into some of the central elements and dimensions in their country’s pandemic management such as understandings of freedom, the execution of power, denialism, exceptionalism, patriotism, the role of expertise and trust in the national state to give a deeper understanding of Sweden’s decisions, failures, successes, and the lessons to be learned. Aimed at readers with interest in global health and politics it will also be of interest in disciplines such as virology, epidemiology, history, cultural studies, ethics, media studies, medicine and economics. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

With contributions from Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael Fullan, Pasi Sahlberg, and Martin Carnoy, Global Education Reform is an eye-opening analysis of national educational reforms and the types of high-achieving systems needed to serve all students equitably. The collection documents the ideologically and educationally distinctive approaches countries around the world have taken to structuring their education systems. Focusing on three pairs of case studies written by internationally acclaimed experts, the book provides a powerful analysis of the different ends of an ideological spectrum----from strong state investments in public education to market-based approaches. An introductory chapter offers an overview of the theories guiding both neoliberal reforms such as those implemented in Chile, Sweden and the United States with efforts to build strong and equitable public education systems as exemplified by Cuba, Finland and Canada. The pairs of case studies that follow examine the historical evolution of education within an individual country and compare and contrast national educational outcomes. A concluding chapter dissects the educational outcomes of the differing economic and governance approaches, as well as the policy implications.