APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200090021-3
circumstances) run for more than 150 days during the course of one insurance year. The financing of unemployment insurance is described in Figure 20.
e. Family allowances
The national government supplements its efforts to insure social security in all its facets by seeking to defray the cost of child care and thus encourage both larger families and greater educational opportunities. In addition to a cast maternity grant, the government pays a family a tax-free allowance of SKr1,200 for each child under 16 years of age. A study allowance of SKr675 per year is paid to the parents of every boy and girl who pursues his or her education past the age of 16. Studied at university-level institutions qualify for further government support in the form of both grants and loans, which in 1970 total SKr4,410 per semester.
Families with low incomes and young children can also obtain a housing allowance, which is subject to a means test. For example, a family with one child under 16 years of age and an income of SKr17,200 per year receives a government housing allowance of SKr720 per year. The amount decreases with rising income, the upper limit for a one-child family to receive any assistance being about SKr22,000 per year. A family with five children receives an allowance of SKr1,680-SKr3,840 per year, depending both on its income and on the number of rooms in the house. The upper income limit for assistance in this case is about SKr40,000. In most communities families with children and low income can also receive local housing allowances, if the cost of housing is high for the family budget. Newly married couples can apply for a home furnishing loan up to SKr4,000, repayable at low interest over a 5-year period. And a growing number of day nurseries, nursery schools, and place centers have been established at public expense to make it feasible for mothers of young children to enter the labor market.
3. Social problems
Sweden has few serious social problems. There is no real poverty, slum areas have practically disappeared, and illiteracy is entirely confined to that infinitesimal fraction of the population that is incapable of learning. Thus, the country is not subject to the social tensions that arise from great inequalities in opportunity and in the distribution of wealth. Even in socially conscious Sweden, however, there is some social malaise. Sweden's suicide rate has consistently been among the 10 highest in the world. The 1968 rate of 21.5 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants compares with rates of 23.9 in Czechoslovakia (1967), 21.6 in Finland, 21.3 in West Germany (1967), 20.5 in Denmark, 17.0 in Switzerland, 15.5 in France (1967), 8.9 in the United Kingdom (1969), 8.1 in Norway, 4.5 in Spain (1967), and 10.7 in the United States. In Sweden, as in most other European societies, nearly three times as many men as women take their lives. The rate for males was 31.4 and for females, 11.7. The highest suicide rate for both sexes occurred after the age of 45, when the rate for males increased to 51.1 and for females to 16.8. Swedish psychologists have proffered any number of reasons for the high national suicide rate, including rising living standards, the long, dark winters, and the increasing number of old and middle-aged persons.
Over and above the known integrity of all Scandinavian statistics, which may account in measure for the relatively high number of people listed flatly as having taken their own lives, qualified investigators concur that there is some cause and effect relationship between a high number of suicides and high living standards. Austrian-born Professor Erwin Stengel has noted in connection with a worldwide study of suicides that "the majority of the people who kill themselves are elderly and many of them are physically sick." He does on to point out that the great medical discoveries—uniformly exploited in "well-off" societies—have benefited mainly the younger age groups, while the diseases of middle and old age still remain to be conquered. Therefore, in the most advanced European societies the average person may now expect to live well into his late sixties, seventies, and often eighties. Thus, Stengel suggests that the welfare state may indeed encourage suicides, but not because of boredom, as has been suggested by some critics, but by enabling people to live longer so that they can reach an age when suicide may be a more attractive alternative than chronic, hopeless, degenerative illness.
Crime, juvenile delinquency, and drunkenness have increased in recent years. One causal factor is the increased concentration of industry, which is bringing a belated wave of urbanization and increased antisocial behavior as one of its attendant ills. Another less clearly defined factor is advanced by a school of psychologists who correlate the increased social malaise in all advanced Western nations with an inability to put greater leisure time to constructive use. In Sweden, as in the United States and other advanced countries, young people seem especially prone to misuse their increased leisure time. In this regard, Swedish psychologists point to an ironic byproduct of the welfare system—parental neglect caused by the need for mothers to work in order to help meet the high costs of the comprehensive welfare
26
APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200090021-3
