The Statistics of Canada

The unemployed in Sweden today have to relate to several types of benefit schemes. Apart from the public unemployment insurance program, different workplaces are covered by different complementary benefit arrangements regulated by collective agreements between employer and union organizations. These Employment Transitional Agreements have existed since the 1970s but have expanded further in scope to include the entire labor market. Besides this occupational welfare arrangement, there are complementary income insurance schemes that the majority of labor unions provide for their members, covering half of the working population today. These are meant to top-up the benefits from the public unemployment insurance program or prolong the benefit payment period. Complementary income insurance schemes first appeared in the late 1990s and expanded quickly during the last fifteen years. While union-provided, group-based insurance schemes dominate the market, there are also private income insurance plans operating based on risk assessment and premium-setting practices on the individual level.This dissertation addresses the questions of how and why these complementary benefits for the unemployed developed and their distributive outcomes. As the public unemployment insurance program has continued to retrench since the 1990s in terms of benefit generosity, coverage as well as recipiency rate, understanding the role of the occupational and private pillars providing the complementary benefits and the interactions between these becomes crucial if we want to understand the actual outcome of the unemployment benefit provision system as a whole.Theoretically, this dissertation accounts for the institutional changes and outcomes of the Swedish unemployment benefit provision system through a multi-pillar perspective. The pillar perspective helps us analyze changes despite relatively stable institutional structure of the Swedish public unemployment insurance program, by highlighting the new roles and distributive logics of the newer loci of the unemployment benefit provision system. Without launching a sweeping statutory institutional reform, the division of responsibility over income protection for the unemployed has been redefined between the state, unions, individuals and market actors – which has implications for the outcomes of unemployment protection.Empirically, the dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of the different pillars of the Swedish unemployment benefit provision system today and analyzes the interactions between the pillars as well as the distributive implications of the system. Moreover, the dissertation explores the outcome of multi-pillarization through a benefit recipiency study targeting unemployed retail workers, using both register as well as survey data.The results highlight that in spite of the institutionalization of both the occupational and private pillars formally achieving a comprehensive coverage for a large part of the working population, in practice there is not only differentiated access to the complementary benefits across different occupations and sectors but also different barriers and mechanisms leading to certain groups of individuals becoming disentitled from the institutionalized unemployment protection system. This gap between the output-level of multi-pillarization and the outcome of the Swedish unemployment benefit provision system may be accounted for by the specific path to multi-pillarization that has been strongly shaped by the institutional legacies of the Ghent system, where unions have played a significant role, as well as labor market developments characterized by a dualization tendency. (Less)

Beyond Retrenchment: Multi-Pillarization of Unemployment Benefit Provision in Sweden

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID) pandemic has challenged an array of democratic institutions in complex, unexpected and unprecedented ways Little academic work, however, has considered the pandemic’s impact on Canada’s judicial institutions This paper aims to fill that gap by exploring the Canadian judicial system’s response to COVID and the prospects for administering justice amidst disasters, all through the lens of resilience After taking a forensic look at how the judicial system has managed the challenges brought on by COVID, we argue that features of resilience like self-organization, preparedness and planning, learning, and reflexive decision-making can significantly contribute to the administration of justice during future shocks Further, we argue that methodologies from policy analysis, such as benefit-cost analysis (BCA), are useful tools for improving the court’s reflexive decision-making to stresses and shocks We propose that the business of judging during shocks can become more integral to the “business as usual” of judicial systems Imagining such a resilient court can be a way to step from COVID to the future of Canada’s judicial system

Imagining Resilient Courts: From COVID to the Future of Canada's Judicial System

Do countries with high corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance support more stringent supranational regulation? Following this logic, existing scholarship claims that Nordic countries push for tougher regulations to sharpen their competitive advantage. On the basis of an examination of the negotiations over the EU Directive 2014/95/EU, a corporate transparency law that requires firms to report on their social, environmental, and human rights impacts, this paper argues that strong CSR performance does not necessarily entail strong support for regulation. Nordic companies perform well when it comes to sustainability, but except for Denmark, Nordic governments’ support for the Directive was lukewarm. To explain why, I examine the dynamics between CSR leaders, business associations, and party politics. I find that business associations are key for explaining this outcome. While some Nordic CSR leaders provided support, business associations, in which SMEs with lower CSR performance comprise the bulk of the members, were forceful opponents of regulation, unless domestic regulations are in place, in which case these associations support supranational regulations to level the playing field. I also stress the importance of partisan politics and extend the analysis to mandatory human rights due diligence. In sum, Nordic countries are much more heterogeneous than what the literature often suggests.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/339DCA69BE2FAFEE9C41E8B0F45A2EFB/S1469356919000193a.pdf/div-class-title-the-tenuous-link-between-csr-performance-and-support-for-regulation-business-associations-and-nordic-regulatory-preferences-regarding-the-corporate-transparency-law-2014-95-eu-div.pdf

The tenuous link between CSR performance and support for regulation: Business associations and Nordic regulatory preferences regarding the corporate transparency law 2014/95/EU

»Nicht alle Krisen wirken sich negativ auf das Ansehen der Regierung aus. Die globale Wirtschaftskrise und der Fall Schweden«. Not all crises have the same impact. In this article the argument is made that we should make a distinction between a “homemade” and an “externally” caused crisis when analyzing the implications of an economic downturn. The case is Sweden and the analyses include both citizens’ and MPs’ attitudes towards democracy before and after the economic crisis of 2008. The article also makes an effort to compare the economic crisis of 2008 to a previous economic crisis that occurred at the beginning of the 1990s. Both crises were related to international turmoil, and they had a clearly negative impact on the Swedish economy. Yet, the crises were also very different. In the crisis of the 1990s, Sweden was seen as one of the countries that suffered the most, while in the aftermath of the economic crisis 2008, Sweden was seen as one of the most successful countries in handling the crisis. By comparing the two crises, we can get a better understanding of the extent to which attribution of responsibility depends on the context of the crisis.

Not all Crises are Detrimental for the Government: The Global Economic Crisis and the Swedish Case

The Perils of VanguardismExplaining radical cuts to unemployment insurance in Sweden

Toronto and Vancouver have been struggling with intense housing affordability problems in recent years. This article looks at one important factor in these affordability challenges: foreign ownersh...

https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/cpp.2019-009

Reconnecting the Housing Market to the Labour Market: Foreign Ownership and Housing Affordability in Urban Canada

The two solitudes of Canadian nativism: Explaining the absence of a competitive anti‐immigration party in Canada

Using new data from the Canadian Housing Statistics Program (CHSP), this paper provides a basis for an integrated account of the Canadian housing market in the last two decades. It shows how the ho...

Joshua C. Gordon

Papers

The Perils of VanguardismExplaining radical cuts to unemployment insurance in Sweden

Reconnecting the Housing Market to the Labour Market: Foreign Ownership and Housing Affordability in Urban Canada

The two solitudes of Canadian nativism: Explaining the absence of a competitive anti‐immigration party in Canada

Solving puzzles in the Canadian housing market: foreign ownership and de-coupling in Toronto and Vancouver