The consequences of the decentralization of pre-school child care in Sweden – national balance and local imbalances

Nathalie Le Bouteillec, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Anders Ögren, Uppsala University

We study how laws implemented on the national level since the early 1990s have affected the local supply and quality of pre-school day care in Sweden. As local governments have quite large autonomy on how to provide services it is on the local level one has to seek the results of these law changes. Since these law changes were ideologically based we also ask if differences in the pre-school child care services between different local governments can be traced to ideological grounds or if they are consequences of local socio-economic structures. We use data from Statistics Sweden (SCB) for the socio economic structure and the association for local governments (Statens kommuner och landsting SKL) for the management of the day care system (funding, staff per child, the educational level of the staff, number of children per section, private vs. public day care, the ratio of children in day care etc.)