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

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 discounte...