A History of the Swedish Pension System

This report provides an extensive overview of the history of the Swedish pension system. Starting with the implementation of the world's first universal public pension system in 1913, the report discusses the political as well as the economic background to each major public pension reform up until today. It presents the rules and the institutional details of these reforms and discuss their implications for retirement behavior, the general state of the economy and the political environment. Parallel to the development of the public pension system, a comprehensive and quite complex occupational pension system has emerged. This report describes the historical background and the institutional details of the four largest agreement-based occupational pension schemes in Sweden.