Future Challenges and Developments
The Swedish welfare state and its “active labour market policies”, even if they came out quite intact from the deep recession of the 1990s, have to face a demand for labour still under the level of the 1980s. In such a context, Bo Lundgren claims that the request for a very intense job-seeking of unemployed does not necessarily improve the functioning of the system. In a situation in which there are often many job-seekers for each vacancy, the job-seeking activity should be limited to jobs with a fair possibility to be gotten by the applicant. How to do this is still a matter of discussion.
The problem of the effects of joining a Swedish labour market programme has been examined by Barbara Sianesi who found it having mixed effects: if it had increased employment rates in its participants, these had also been found to remain «significantly longer» on benefits and into the unemployment programme, especially for those entering a programme just after having been entitled to unemployment grants. The potential “locking-in effects” have to be inquired and solved as well: nowadays, some working categories (women with part-time jobs, manpower-employed, seasonal workers, students, own-businessmen, …) misuse the unemployment benefits; some administrative courts cases are expected to clarify these categories’ position about unemployment insurances.
At the same time, also other aspects of the systems are likely to be revised. The Alliance for Sweden electoral coalition who won the 2006 elections endorsed the idea that each section of the labour market should carry its own costs of unemployment benefits paid out to put pressure on the wage level and make the demand for labour to rise again and unemployment diminish. They claimed that a substantially larger part of the costs for the insurance should be financed by individual fees of the involved workers, conceiving to stop the intra-fund solidarity mechanisms.
Read more about this topic: Unemployment Benefits In Sweden
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