Is the welfare state to blame for the economic crisis in Sweden?

Sweden, by many regarded as the archetypal welfare state, has since the beginning of the 1990s experienced an economic crisis similar to the economic depression of the 1930s. According to several domestic and foreign economic advisors, the welfare state is to blame for this situation. One very common departure for analysis of the economic crisis has been that Sweden's economic growth has lagged when compared to other industrialized countries. It has been argued that Sweden's poor economic growth is a result of economic inefficiency caused by the Swedish welfare state and that the only way to improve Sweden's economy is to radically change the Swedish model of welfare. In this article we scrutinize the assumption that the Swedish economy has performed poorly since the beginning of the 1970s. The article demonstrate that Sweden has not performed poorly vis-a-vis other comparable countries in terms of growth in GDP.