ABSTRACT
It has frequently been claimed that after the Second World War, Sweden had one of the most highly centralised systems of wage bargaining in the world. The level of co-ordination between employees and employers in Swedish labour markets may well have been among the highest in the world during the first three decades after the war, but since the mid 1980s there have been substantial changes in the way that wages are determined. In particular there has been a move to local bargaining in both the private and public sectors. This move started in the private sector in the mid eighties but has also been pronounced in the Swedish central government sector. Though an element of local pay determination had been a feature of the central agreements covering central government employees throughout the 1980s, in 1989 the central grading system was abolished and a system of individual and differentiated pay was introduced.
