In the 1990s, individuals aged 18–64 were eligible for disability insurance, if their work capacity was reduced by at least 25 percent (50 percent before 1993). In the beginning of the period, before 1991, disability insurance could also be granted for labor market reasons (i.e., if unemployed...

As summarized in our introductory Chapter 1, the trend toward ever-healthier elderly seems to have been broken (Figures 8 and 9). The share of young and middle-aged Swedish men and women, reporting very good or good health status to the Survey of Living Conditions, started to decline already in...

In Sweden, responsibility for the public care of the frail elderly rests with three authorities acting at different levels. At national level, the Riksdag and the Government realize policy goals through legislation and financial control measures. At regional level, 18 county councils and two...

The Swedish health care system is commonly characterized as a national health-service (or Beveridge) model ( Freeman, 2000 ; Blank and Burau, 2004 ). It is certainly both financed by taxes and organized as a government responsibility, but it has developed over time as a decentralized rather than...

There are many factors that may explain the number of spells and the number of days of absence from work reported as due to sickness. Health problems seem to be the most natural candidate to include among the explanatory factors, but individual health behavior could enter the scene in several...

Concerning migration on a national level, two phenomena emerge: people migrating from one region to another and people moving from the countryside to the cities. The geographical shift of the population between regions in a country is a slow process. In Sweden, only a few percent of the...

The challenge of an ageing population is a major concern to policymakers and researchers all over the world. As evident in Figure 1 , the percentage of people aged 60 and above will increase substantially between 2000 and 2050 in all parts of the world. Europe has the highest proportion; only...

It is not easy to get a long perspective on the distribution of wealth in Sweden because there is no single data source that gives a consistent view for a long period of time. The early estimates of the distribution of wealth were based on the concept of tax-assessed wealth which is the basis of...

In 1997, SESIM was developed as a tool at the Swedish ministry of finance to evaluate the Swedish system to finance higher education. Part of that work was documented in Ericson and Hussénius (2000) . We refer to this as version I of SESIM. Focus then shifted from education to pensions. SESIM...