The development of newspapers in Japan and Sweden follow radically different paths. The newspapers fulfilled quite different roles in the two countries and were to an extensive degree reflecting the societies in which they were produced. This paper will start by giving a short overview of the...

Japan and the Nordic countries similarly experienced a serious collapse of the Bubble economy in the early 1990s, but the financial recovery of the former is extremely delayed compared with the latter. In Japan, the Ministry of Finance is often accused of this, with the claim that it has acted...

This paper examines a number of traditional characteristics of the Swedish welfare state, and discusses how they have been changed over time, especially since the economic crisis in the early 1990s. It emphasizes that the country did not only suffer from the economic crisis and recent...

Ten years have passed since the Swedish government widely encouraged its municipalities to marketize their elderly care services. There has been a long-standing discussion on the benefit of marketization during that period, but most of the discussions were developed from the case studies of a...

The Swedish experience of the recovery from financial system crisis with quick structural reform has often drawn attention as one of the “best practices” from policy makers in various countries. Most of the previous observations, however, merely focused on the aspect of policy measures, such...

As Japan and the Nordic countries entered the final decade of the 20th century, they experienced an abrupt end to a near decade-long rapid surge in asset prices. An era of economic optimism was transformed into recession and a difficult cleaning-up process of the financial sector started....