ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an earlier study of European policy instruments available to encourage adjustment to reduced levels of military spending. European workers have long been noted as tradition-bound and resistant to geographical mobility. Sweden's active labor market policy appears to deal with the issues directly. While assistance measures are available in several of the European countries studied, none was discovered which promised to be substantially more effective in dealing with defense dislocations than those currently in use in the United States—particularly at the state and local government level. The Swedish government has demonstrated more interest in the general issue of long-term economic conversion, as evidenced by several government studies and reports, but even there, few explicit policy actions have been implemented. An official of the Swedish industrifonden commented that the formation of his organization in 1979, in part, reflected a concern over the effects on important firms of declining expenditures for military research and development and nuclear energy.
