ABSTRACT
The American writer Mark Twain was reported to have remarked upon seeing his prematurely printed obituary in the newspaper: ‘reports of my death are greatly exaggerated’. Some parallel between Twain’s situation and that of Sweden’s welfare state is easily apparent. Intermittent battering from economic slowdown and some three decades of periodic discussions of welfare state crisis has prompted more than an occasional pronouncement that the Swedish model2 is dead. Newspaper headlines in late 1999 in the Swedish capital, such as ‘Nearly All Stockholm Is For Sale’3 (Metro Tidningen 15 November 1999) and ‘System Shift Continues’ (Expressen 16 November 1999), appeared to herald a transformation of what are considered to be some of the core locally managed institutions of Sweden’s welfare model. A wide range of public facilities and services – rental housing, a major hospital, primary care services, even crisis services for women – were being sold outright or considered for contracting out to private management by the Moderateled governing coalition. The process continued in fits and starts for the next three years until by a razor-thin margin, the 2002 elections shifted political power in Stockholm back to Social Democratic (SAP) leadership.4
