Swedish pioneers: from active to “hands-off” governance

Abstract

Sweden, an early modernizer, attempted to govern SOEs more independently from politics, although retaining significant public holdings. While, in our view, Sweden ultimately ran into a number of signifcant failures, it also clocked up a number of successes. Experience with the three quite different strategies that Sweden has pursued over the past few decades is instructive and is therefore told in some detail, before we move to what we see as a better approach in later chapters.