National balance and local imbalances: Fertility, public policy and pre-school child care in Sweden

How does locally induced demand for public services adapt to national public policies? Changing fertility puts pressure on the supply of local social services. Sweden is often used as a positive example for welfare states not least when it comes to measures within pre-school child care. Since the 1990s Sweden’s system of collective pre-school child care has been transformed to a system which combines collective care with individual choices. Our main question is how these changing policies have affected the supply and quality of the service of pre-school day care knowing that fluctuations of fertility rates affect the demand. On a national level the number of places available is close to the level of demand. But the demand for pre-school child care fluctuates according to fertility which is expressed at the local level. So at the local level such an equilibrium between demand and supply is more vulnerable and it is far from always that this demand can be met.
To study the local management of the day care system and to test the homogeneity of day care supply to pre-school kids in Sweden in different regions we will use this data together with data on day care (förskolor) from the association for local governments (Statenskommunerochlandsting SKL) and link those data with the database on individual level at Statistics Sweden.