Britt-Marie Was Here

The global financial crisis of 2008 severely affected countries around the world. Sweden’s economy was not immune but recovered more quickly than other parts of both Europe and the globe. This was in part due to the previous Swedish financial crisis of the early 1990s; because of this experience, the country learned to “address the underlying causes of the [1990s] crisis to create an economic and financial system that [would] be more resilient when bad times return[ed]” in 2008 (Irwin, Neil, “Five Economic Lessons from Sweden, the Rock Star of the Recovery.” The Washington Post, 24 June 2011). While the Swedish GDP increased by 2011, the crisis’s effects on Sweden’s unemployment levels remained a consistent problem, especially for young people new to the workforce, people with lower levels of education, and migrants. While programs were put in place to train and motivate these groups—along with aging job-seekers and people with disabilities—for entry into the job market, many of these jobs were part-time, fixed-term, or temporary, especially for blue-collar workers, rather than the full-time job opportunities offered to white-collar workers. This only somewhat alleviated the unemployment problem, even as the overall economy recovered (Anxo, Dominique, and Thomas Ericson, “