ABSTRACT
The Scandinavian economies present a puzzle: On the one hand they are often discussed as a group because they display many similarities in their industrial relations systems and welfare regimes. On the other hand governments in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have adopted very different approaches to wage regulation, labor market intervention, and welfare reform, as Table 6.1 exemplifies. While the dominant reform strategy in Finland and Norway has privileged social pact offers rather than legislation, Denmark and Sweden have displayed the opposite pattern, with a preponderance of legislation and relatively few pact offers. Between 1988 and 2006 successive Finnish governments have offered 13 pacts to the social partners despite the fact that the country has been ruled by majority governments throughout the entire period, a feature that would have facilitated a purely legislative process of reform (Nousiainen 2003 : 266-7). In contrast, both conservative and Social Democratic governments in Sweden, normally minority administrations, have sought to bypass union negotiation and legislate on labor-related issues on five occasions since the beginning of 1990. Moreover, in the wake of pact rejections they have resorted to legislation on three further occasions. 1 It is these substantial national differences in the approach to reform that constitute the focus of this chapter.
