9058009781

Hąrtmann, Sweden

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As in most OECD-countries, youth unemployment rates in Sweden showed a steady increase during the 1970s and the early 1980s. Though morę and morę young people continued to secondary education, the unemployment ratę for those aged 16-19 rosę from 4.3 X in 1970 to 10.6 X in 1982. Al-though these figures were fairly Iow in comparison to some other EC-coun-tries as the u£ or Italy, the increase in youth unemployment caused a lively debate among Swedish politicians and the generał public leading to a variety of measures to curb youth unemployment and to keep young people off the streets.

Contrary to the majority of EC-countries in which youth unemployment -despite the efforts of governments to reduce unemployment - is still on the rise, the measures taken by the Swedish government effectively lowered the unemployment ratę for youth aged 16-19 to 4.1 X in 1985. This figurę is still about 50X higher than the unemployment ratę of the total working population 16-74, but is very close to the youth unemployment level during the 1960s and early 1970s and might be considered as a "normal" level of frictional unemployment for the age group concerned.

What then is the secret behind this successful struggle against the rise of youth unemployment in Sweden? Are there possibilities to eiport the in-struments of an active employment policy for youth to other countries?

In order to answer these questions we need to give a fairly detailed de-scription of the development of Swedish macro-economic planning with special attention to the labour market policies carried out in Sweden. Fur-thermore, we must speak about the cultural and historical background against which the Swedish youth employment policy has to be analyzed. In this conteit, the structure of the educational system and the enrolment in secondary education is of special concern, as differences in the organization of vocational training (either as full-time programme in the school system or as dual responsibility of school authorities and employers) create differences in the interpretation of national statistics and the instruments avail-able to influence youth participation on the labour market.