Engineer training in Sweden during the postwar period in the context of technical and structural change

Abstract

A predilection for far-reaching social planning has been the norm in Sweden for most of the postwar period. During the Second World War, for example, planning ideas were developed by Swedish economists and officials (most of them associated with Social Democratic circles) serving on the Myrdal Commission, as it was called.1 Many of these ideas turned up subsequently in the labour movement's postwar programme and were implemented to some extent during the 1950s and 1960s. In this way a kind of supply economy came into operation. Many prominent Swedish economists became heavily involved in the work of forecasting and planning, in which oneimportant planning aim was the avoidance of structural problems. The end in view, in other words, was to plan in such a way that mutually complementary combinations of productive resources were to hand at every given point in time. Manpower forecasts and socio-economic ‘long-term planning commissions’ were some of the instruments that came to.be employed.