ABSTRACT
The Nordic countries are world-known for their comprehensive welfare states and their low levels of inequality. Some people think that such a welfare state is a dystopia to be avoided at all costs. Others believe the Nordic welfare state is a paradise on earth. Both critics and supporters agree that the Nordic countries share a number of features that in a catch-all term can be said to be ‘the Nordic welfare model’ with a distinct set of goals, policies, and outcomes. The goal of equality, most notably between rich and poor and between men and women,
constitutes a beacon of hope for egalitarian thinking in many countries. At the same time other observers see the same phenomena, equality, as at odds with efficiency. The big trade-off between equality and efficiency, as aptly labelled by neo-classical economist Arthur Okun (1975) nearly 40 years ago. Okun believed that providing generous benefits to people will result in economic inefficiencies as compared to a situation without such benefits. The other perspective is that benefits nurture the economy, most notably through social investments, by mitigating the detrimental effects of economic downturns and by stimulating productive but risk-based economic behaviour (Myrdal, 1960; Kuusi, 1964). In this chapter we focus on the principles, policies, and outcomes in the Nordic welfare state.
In the next section we introduce the goals of the Nordic model in terms of key principles like universality and inequality and describe how these principles were first instigated in policies and what challenges they are said to confront in the 2010s. In the following section we analyse policy outcomes in a number of central areas from a comparative perspective. In the concluding section we assess these policy developments and welfare outcomes in view of current challenges in a discussion of the future for the Nordic welfare model in the Nordic countries and in other countries.
In this section we present the goals of the Nordic welfare model and the policies used to try to achieve these goals. We focus on key concepts of inequality and social mobility on the side of goals and outcomes, and we focus on concepts like universalism and generosity when setting out the policy side. We briefly look into the roots and development of these concepts.
