John Lapidus, "The Quest for a Divided Welfare State: Sweden in the Era of Privatization" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

New Books in Economic and Business History · Dec 16, 2021 · 45m

Generous welfare states are losing their key characteristics, not least in Sweden, where privatisation of funding has proceeded privatisation of provision, beginning in the 1990s. Supplementary exclusionary sources of welfare in healthcare, education, and social care, have proliferated throughout European welfare states under the neoliberal agenda that has dominated debate across the developed world. Rather than full privatisation, we see semi-private solutions, in which the citizen becomes the consumer, but remains subsidised by the state in their pursuit of private welfare, via tax breaks…