As many as a quarter of working-age people in Sweden are not self-sufficient, writes Svenskt Näringsliv. To solve the problems, it says, among other things, that there should be higher activity requirements for those who are not self-sufficient.
A new in-depth report from Svenskt Näringsliv has analysed how common it is for people in Sweden not to be self-sufficient over time. The results show that 1.3 million people are not self-sufficient, or are students who are also not included in these figures.
The report, written by chief economist Sven-Olov Daunfeldt and economist Johan Lidefelt, follows the Entreprenörskapsforum’s classification that a person with an income of more than the equivalent of around €1,7900, i.e. a monthly income of around SEK 13,500, is self-sufficient.
The report shows that a quarter of all working-age Swedes do not reach these amounts. In 2020, 57% of those who were not self-sufficient had not been in the last five years, which means that around 700,000 people did not reach the income level over a six-year period.
Around half a million also had an annual earned income that was below one price base amount each year, or SEK 47 200. In other words, one third of the non-self-sufficient group had virtually no income from work over six years.
Daunfeldt and Lidefelt argue that, among other things, higher activity requirements need to be set for the non-self-sufficient and that the alternative to work should not be leisure time. Another important piece of the puzzle, they argue, could be the so-called ‘establishment jobs’, which, among other things, offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to employ immigrants and the long-term unemployed, for example, at a lower cost.
