Welfare regimes and macroeconomic regime constellations: explaining the Scandinavian anomaly. (30th March 2010)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sauer, Thomas; Vogel, Lena
• Is Part Of: International journal of public policy. Volume 5:Number 4(2010)
• Page Start: 331
• Page End: 356
• Publication Date: 2010-03-30
• Subjects: macroeconomic resilience -- macroeconomic regime constellations -- MERCs -- welfare regime constellations -- WERCs -- structural vector autoregressions -- SVARs -- Scandinavia -- Denmark -- Finland -- Sweden -- Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development -- OECD -- macroeconomic growth -- stabilisation -- stability -- econometrics -- public policy -- governance; Political planning -- Periodicals; Public administration -- Periodicals; 351.05
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1740-0600

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, the Scandinavian countries have recovered from one of the most severe crises of any Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country ever, returning to a 'high road' growth path and also succeeding in terms of macroeconomic stabilisation indicators. To explain the causes for this coincidence of macroeconomic growth and stability, we propose a theory of macroeconomic resilience. We merge different theoretical strands into a joint approach of Macroeconomic Regime Constellations (MERCs) and Welfare Regime Constellations (WERCs). In the econometric part of our inquiry, we estimate Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) to analyse the existence and consistency of MERCs in Sweden, Finland and Denmark.