Nordic welfare

Nordic welfare 2025

Theme and its relevance
Wealth creation and distribution have followed in the Nordic countries a rather unique and stable pattern during the last 50-60 years.  The main characteristics can be summarized as follows:

• High growth by means of strong industrial basis and consensus oriented labor relations (collective agreements) full employment as the main goal;
• The construction of universal public services ( education, health) and  social benefits financed by relatively high tax rate made possible by strong growth and employment;
• Developed democratic participation ( incl. the crucial role of local self-government, voluntary associations, and collective interest representation);
• Equality as a major objective (incl. gender, educational and regional equality);
• Policy coordination supporting virtuous circles, which strengthen the overall policy impacts.

This pattern of social change and reform has been succesful on global scale:  Sweden and Finland are together with Korea leading knowledge-based development in the world (OECD) and economic growth has been here clearly over the OECD average.

The pattern has been supported by a beneficial population development, as all age groups were growing for many decades.  Now only older age groups are growing in all EU countries.  This puts big pressures
on the size and structure of labor force, on financing of welfare services and benefits as well as on societal renewal.  A change in ideological climate which has been effective in recent years has moved the emphasis from a state-centered model to a more subsidiary type model.  The economic recession and the crisis of global financial system make the future prospects even more challenging.  Some of the traditional flagships of Finnish and Swedish industries (incl. paper and pulp and car industries) are going trough difficult transition, which makes foresighting of economic and financial prospects as well as of sustainability extremely demanding.

It is time to form a common knowledge base and relevant policy perspectives for responding in an appropriate, innovative and sustainable way to challenges of Nordic welfare.  The responses must be based on sound knowledge, they must recognize long-and short-term transformations, they must be future-oriented, they must deal with the challenges in European and global context and they must lead to more effective and more sustainable public policies.

The European context is essential.  All EU member countries have basically the same challenges, including aging of population and the same kind of socio-economic characteristics- if viewed from global perspective (European social model). Sweden and Finland are just the right choices for elaborating the future development: they have a good record, they have managed to do what other EU countries would like to do and they have globally high level of research in the field.

Goals and objectives
The major goal is to get better understanding of different trajectories of structural changes in Finnish and Swedish societies.  This understanding creates the basis of forming policy alternatives, which must be tested in relevant policy-making communities.

The objective is to form a common scientific base for sustainable Nordic society. It will not consist mainly of disciplinary research papers, but to a large extent of development of monitoring and foresighting methods for unforeseen changes.  These methods should make it possible to analyse and forecast, which kind of intented or unintended changes in the system are sustainable and which not. 

There will be a demand for expertise at least in the following fields:

• Future development of population and labor force
• Intergenerational accounting  and generation contract (economics and public policy)
• Youth research
• Migration ( also in the global and European  scale)
• Multiculturalism
• Labor relations and working life
• Education (incl. future demand of qualified people as well as a social inclusion in multicultural society;  formal and informal education)
• Determinants of health and wellbeing ( focus on social determinants of health, because a decisive proportion of major public health challenges correlate with social exclusion and low income level)
• Regional development ( economic development - concentration of population - development of infrastructures and public services)
• Management of public policies and public management (incl. local policies and relationship between national and local levels);
•  Third sector; relationships between civil society (NGO’s), public policies and private sector, incl. the role of church and parishes; mixed welfare provision

It belongs to the very nature of this kind of enterprise, that it has a high degree of multidiciplinarity. The issues listed above form an interlinked whole, and defining of these linkages is one of the most challenging tasks.

Proposed actions´
The most effective procedure to achieve the goals is to put together a joint four-year Finnish-Swedish researchprogramme.  The programme should be put together in such a way, that the following conditions will be met:

• A sufficient combination of different research  areas
• High quality of research
• A functioning link between high quality research and  competent policy planning and policy making

The last condition can be met if the programme will include policy fora, in which researchers, policy makers and policy engineers as well as competent professionals from other organizations will
participate. These fora are important in the foresight of (global, European and Nordic) development trends in the central issues and in the assessment of policy alternatives both on the Nordic and European level.

The main goal of these policy fora is knowledge sharing. They should be functioning from the very beginning, not only after research results are ready to be communicated.  Researchers from universities and research institutes,   policy experts from respective ministries and central agencies, experts and practitioners from professional organizations and third sector should participate. They could function like so called think tanks, which means, that fora have each a maximum of 10-15 participants and in each of them a variety of expertise in the topic under consideration is represented.  The results of each forum would be communicated to all participants of the programme.

This is a special strength of the proposed programme.  It would enable a quite new way of cooperation between research and policy making and a new approach for the cooperation of six ministries of Finland and Sweden.

Prerequisites of the implementation (financing, organizations, etc.)
The further design of the initiative and its funding options should have participants from research councils, ministerial research funding as well as from pension funds and foundations. The participation of respective ministries (ministries of education, ministries of social affairs and health and ministries of employment) is essential from the point of view of linking knowledge base and policy making. The participation on pension funds is important because of their central role in the Nordic welfare system and because of the nature of challenges described above. 

The research councils should take the lead in the initiative.

There are two options for implementation: either  a comprehensive programme, which would be able to  define in a very reliable way the interlinkages of the different issues and to foresight  their possible changes  with methodological rigour; or  a smaller targeted programme in which a set of these interlinkages are chosen for research and policy formulation.  The comprehensive programme would require funds ca 20 M euros.