Structural Unemployment as a New Social Risk in the Nordic Countries — A Critical Reassessment

Historically, the Nordic countries have only experienced modest levels of unemployment. The extreme cases are Sweden and Norway, which in the post-war period up until 1990 never experienced unemployment levels above 4 per cent. Thus, citizens could become sick, disabled and old but the risk of joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed was modest. This changed dramatically at the beginning of the 1990s when Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland experienced high levels of unemployment. This situation naturally increased the risk of unemployment. However, at the elite level, especially in Denmark, it also gave birth to the idea that the character of the risk had changed. In the simplest form, the diagnosis was that those with low education and those with a history of unemployment could never be reintegrated into the post-industrial labour markets (Larsen & Goul Andersen 2009, Goul Andersen 2003). This idea discredited the old Keynesian policies, which by means of macro-economic steering aimed at creating a demand for labour, and called for new ‘active’ policies which aimed at altering the character of the labour supply, that is, the motivation and qualifications of the unemployed. The Danish policy-makers labelled these supply-side policies ‘structural policies’ as they were aimed at lowering the level of structural unemployment.