The significance of Swedish rental policy: Cost renting: Command economy versus the social market in comparative perspective

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Abstract
Recent literature on the Swedish rental system has missed the central significance of the Swedish system for international comparative purposes by neglecting the rent‐setting system and by unwittingly adopting an Anglo‐Saxon perspective. In this paper I attempt to rectify this by developing a comparative conceptual framework for the analysis of rental systems. I outline the post‐war history of the Swedish rent‐setting system, and argue that this constitutes an example of a unitary social rental market in the making, whereby public and private renting are integrated and public renting expands to become market leader for rent‐setting purposes. According to this model, public renting is allowed to compete with private renting such that its cost structure increasingly determines the rent levels on the rental market as a whole. This ‘market strategy’ constrasts to the Anglo‐Saxon model in which public renting is segregated from private renting, its growth suppressed (or even reversed through discounted sales) to prevent public renting competing with private renting and owner occupation. The ‘command policy’ uses the principles of the command economy to achieve the goal of sheltering both owner occupation and private renting from competition from a non‐profit form of rental housing. Other countries where a market policy has been adopted, such as Germany and the Netherlands, are also discussed.

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