Sweden Finland Austria

1.4.
Conclusion
A general conclusion could be that, according to the first two of the three institutional
aspects used for the comparison, the Danish system is opposite to the Austrian and Ger-
man systems with the other countries in between. The principles used to finance the
schemes are rather similar in the 8 countries, with Denmark having the lowest employer
paid social contributions. The similarity between the Danish and the Swedish systems is
not so strong as is often anticipated, they are quite different, which will become even
clearer after the more detailed comparisons in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 2
Comparison of the separate elements of
social security in the 8 countries
This chapter will focus on the characteristics of each of the selected elements of the social
security systems in the 8 countries. As already mentioned these elements are:
Illness
Unemployment
Injuries from work
Disability/invalidity
Retirement 
Having children
Maternity leave
As a supplement, a set of calculations of the combined effect of taxation and social security
has been performed for each social security element and compared with disposable income
when fully employed. As mentioned in the introduction, the framework for these calcula-
tions is the 
Average Production Worker' or 
Average Employee' derived from ’The Tax/
Benefit Position of Employees', an annual publication from the OECD.
The calculations are documented in appendix 1, and the following is a short note on the
interpretation of the calculations.
2.1.