ABSTRACT
The cautiously expansionist ‘crisis policy’ that Ernst Wigforss, the minister of finance, pursued from 1933 can hardly be said to have played an important part in Sweden’s economic recovery after that year. A more important factor was the greater competitiveness achieved by the structural rationalisations of the 1920s and the devaluation of the Swedish krona in 1932. But the crisis policy must be considered in a broader context. It marks the beginning of a forty-four-year period of Social Democratic government power (until 1976), a record hard to beat in the history of modern Western parliamentarianism. What the short-and long-term effects would have been if the Social Democratic Party had not, through its famous process of ‘horse-trading’ with the Agrarian Party, been able to implement its crisis policy, is difficult to say. However, it is clear that in this long period of government power, durable institutional frameworks were put in place which enabled continued economic growth in Sweden. It is likely that it helped create the conditions required for the rapid growth and transformation that took place from the 1940s onwards.
