The Financialization of the Swedish Growth Model
The Financialization of the Swedish Growth Model

Author: Viktor Skyrman

Publisher: Viktor Skyrman

Published: 2024-03-01

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 917731297X

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Financialization, the increasing influence of financial markets, actors, practices and measurements in political, economic and social life, continues to draw attention from scholars from diverse academic fields. Contributing to the literatures on household financialization, financial market institutionalization and the financialization of nature, this dissertation explores the underlying factors that enabled and facilitated the financialization of Sweden’s growth model. Drawing from the Regulation Approach and heterodox economics, it analyzes how covered bonds, an overlooked topic in financialization studies, have contributed to “de-risking” European financial markets, decelerated the spread of securitization, and enabled an increase in mortgage lending, house price inflation and household indebtedness, especially in Sweden. Zooming in on the Nordic forest industry, the dissertation furthermore elaborates on the differential impact of financialization on non-financial firms. Amid the entrance of shareholder value ideology, it shows how innovation was undermined through R&D downsizing while dividends have been increased to shareholders at labor’s expense. Meanwhile, profitability has been supported by appreciating forest assets that are increasingly treated as a new financial asset class by the financial sector. In addition, providing data on welfare retrenchment, financialization indicators and corporate governance, while app lying a Gramscian Regulation Approach, the dissertation analyzes the structural pressures and the formation of a particular neoliberal hegemony that have shaped the financialization of Sweden’s previously universal welfare sector. Whereas financial markets have been seen as crucial for growth and employment, the dissertation furthermore documents how financial deepening has mainly resulted in increased mortgage lending, while public sector debt has increasingly been perceived as economically detrimental by policymakers. The dissertation finalizes with some stylized facts of financialization in small Wes tern economies and how they relate to Sweden.

Sweden
Sweden

Author: International Monetary Fund. Monetary and Capital Markets Department

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2016-11-17

Total Pages: 61

ISBN-13: 1475554613

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This paper discusses the findings of the Financial System Stability Assessment for Sweden. The Swedish financial system is large and highly interconnected, putting a premium on the accompanying policy framework. Relative to the size of the domestic economy, the financial system is among Europe’s largest. It features complex domestic and international linkages, reflecting Sweden’s role as a regional financial hub. However, the macrofinancial risks have grown since 2011, for example the rising share of highly indebted households. Stress tests also suggest that banks and nonbanks are largely resilient to solvency shocks, but concerns persist about the ability of bank models to capture unexpected losses.

Diminishing Returns
Diminishing Returns

Author:

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-07-01

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 0197607888

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A set of state of the art empirical analyses at the country, regional, and global level that work from a new theoretical framework that analyzes the politics of growth and stagnation. As highlighted by the recent debate on 'secular stagnation,' economic growth has slowed down considerably, and this has given rise to a host of new problems, from financial instability to the collapse of mainstream parties. What happens when growththe main mechanism of capitalist legitimationis harder to come by and less broadly shared? And how should we think about capitalist diversity in the context of global stagnation? In Diminishing Returns, Lucio Baccaro, Mark Blyth, and Jonas Pontusson address these questions by bringing together a number of comparative and international political economists with expertise across many different countries and regions. Going beyond the methodological nationalism common in most comparative research, each author departs from a common theoretical framework, the Growth Model Perspective, and contributes to develop it further. The outcome is a new theoretical framework to help social scientists, policymakers, and opinion makers, understand the politics of growth and stagnation, which offers state of the art empirical analyses at the country, regional, and global level.

Sweden's Welfare State
Sweden's Welfare State

Author: Mr.Subhash Madhav Thakur

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2003-05-01

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781589061583

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Sweden has long been viewed as epitomizing a particular approach to economic and social policy. To its advocates, the Swedish welfare state builds on a strong social consensus favoring extensive state intervention to ensure a high quality of life for all Swedes. To its critics, the Swedish system is marked by excessive government intervention and attendant inefficiencies. These contrasting views are captured in imagery used by Prime Minister Göran Persson: "Think of a bumblebee. With its overly heavy body and little wings, supposedly it should not be able to fly--but it does." The Swedish welfare state is the bumblebee that has managed to fly. This book draws on many years of IMF surveillance and policy advice to explain how it has done so, to assess the challenges that the Swedish model faces in the new century, to propose a strategy for dealing with those challenges, and to draw lessons for the many other countries that face similar challenges from globalization and demographics.

Reforming the Welfare State
Reforming the Welfare State

Author: Richard B. Freeman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-04-15

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0226261913

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Over the course of the twentieth century, Sweden carried out one of the most ambitious experiments by a capitalist market economy in developing a large and active welfare state. Sweden's generous social programs and the economic equality they fostered became an example for other countries to emulate. Of late, Sweden has also been much discussed as a model of how to deal with financial and economic crisis, due to the country's recovery from a banking crisis in the mid-1990s. At that time economists heatedly debated whether the welfare state caused Sweden's crisis and should be reformed—a debate with clear parallels to current concerns over capitalism. Bringing together leading economists, Reforming the Welfare State examines Sweden's policies in response to the mid-1990s crisis and the implications for the subsequent recovery. Among the issues investigated are the way changes in the labor market, tax and benefit policies, local government policy, industrial structure, and international trade affected Sweden's recovery. The way that Sweden addressed its economic challenges provides valuable insight into the viability of large welfare states, and more broadly, into the way modern economies deal with crisis.

An Economic History of Sweden
An Economic History of Sweden

Author: Lars Magnusson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2000-03-23

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 113467595X

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This book represents the first recent attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment of Sweden's economic development since the middle of the 18th century. It traces the rapid industrialisation, the political currents and the social ambitions, that transformed Sweden from a backward agrarian economy into what is now regarded by many as a model welfar

A History of Corporate Governance around the World
A History of Corporate Governance around the World

Author: Randall K. Morck

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 700

ISBN-13: 0226536831

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For many Americans, capitalism is a dynamic engine of prosperity that rewards the bold, the daring, and the hardworking. But to many outside the United States, capitalism seems like an initiative that serves only to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few hereditary oligarchies. As A History of Corporate Governance around the World shows, neither conception is wrong. In this volume, some of the brightest minds in the field of economics present new empirical research that suggests that each side of the debate has something to offer the other. Free enterprise and well-developed financial systems are proven to produce growth in those countries that have them. But research also suggests that in some other capitalist countries, arrangements truly do concentrate corporate ownership in the hands of a few wealthy families. A History of Corporate Governance around the World provides historical studies of the patterns of corporate governance in several countries-including the large industrial economies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States; larger developing economies like China and India; and alternative models like those of the Netherlands and Sweden.

An Economic History of Modern Sweden
An Economic History of Modern Sweden

Author: Lennart Schön

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2012-04-27

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1136338500

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The book is based on a rich and detailed quantitative material from research over the past decades with consecutive time series over production volumes, employment, productivity, investments etc. for sectors and branches covering the whole economy, even including estimates of non-marketed domestic work. It is also based on a broad literature from Swedish historiography with details on the individual level of firms, innovators and entrepreneurs. Focus is upon the interplay between technological, economic and social change where a number of broad themes are treated with a general interest to historians or economists, e.g. the role of social change and domestic markets versus international specialisation and exports as dynamic factors in Swedish economic growth.