Until a few months ago, the policy and academic debate in the EU revolved around the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), praised across the board as proof of European solidarity and a concrete manifestation of the EU commitment to address the pandemic crisis. The RRF indeed marked a leap forward towards a stronger redistributive role […]
Welfare State
Being remote in the Nordic region can mean a lot of things. There are some counter-narratives to the dominating narrative of depopulation and ageing. These involve people’s shift in lifestyle priorities and also the effects of the green transition that may set the scene for a decade of making the periphery less remote. However, decisions on service provisions challenge the revitalisation of communities. The welfare society in the Nordic region faces many complex issues – one of them is the need for a radical change of perspectives and policy for rural and remote communities.
Wage inequality is on the rise, pushed by technological change, globalisation and trade, and institutional deregulation. It is a problem of fairness. But inequality itself also has negative effects on the economy as a whole. Increasingly, this inequality can be traced back to companies and pay setting. Companies increasingly differ in their productivity and revenue. […]
All left-wing parties experience a dramatic loss of votes in the recent elections in the Netherlands. The Labour Party did not lose votes but remain at their all-time low. Short-term reasons explain in part the poor performance. But long-term factors explain why Social Democracy will remain in dire straits. In 2012, when the country was […]
The first rule of the Swedish coronavirus strategy was to protect the elderly. But we failed. The welfare state, once the pride of the Social Democratic government, has been weakened by decades of austerity and profit-oriented management logic. As a part of building the welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s, the Nordic countries professionalised […]
