Lithuanian social policy model: why does it not resemble the Swedish one?

Abstract

Sweden and Lithuania experienced completely different stages of historical state development. Swedish capitalism and social market relationship developed in a sustainable way during most of the 20th century, with welfare improving gradually, whereas Lithuania started developing a new social security model as late as in the last decade of the 20th century under unfavourable conditions of transformation from totalitarian socialism to market economy and democracy. The purpose of the paper is to compare the Swedish and Lithuanian models of a welfare state and to identify factors that influence the choice of a particular model. For the purposes of this paper, the institutional social democratic Swedish welfare state model is selected as a reference point for analysing the Lithuanian social security system.