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Social service models have been reframed and reshaped by marketisation in most advanced welfare states, including in the Nordic countries. Given their long history of universal provision of tax-financed, publicly provided social servcies, it is important to understand how and why marketisation has taken hold in the Nordic countries. In this report, our focus is on marketisation in eldercare. Our aim is to understand how this process has been enacted and what its effects have been. What kinds of market reform have been carried out in Nordic eldercare systems? What mechanisms and instruments have been implemented? What has the impact of marketisation been on users of eldercare, on care workers and on eldercare systems? Are marketisation trends similar in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway or are there major differences between them?

We approach these questions and issues in two ways. First, the report presents four chapters about marketisation trends and market instruments in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway respectively (Chapters 2–5). Second, an international perspective is offered on some central concerns raised by marketisation, including the tendency for the share of for-profit provision to increase, and the challenge of regulating publicly funded social services when they are privately provided. Three chapters by experts on eldercare in Canada and the United States present research on the problems of quality regulation in highly marketised systems (Chapters 6 and 7) and on quality differences between different types of public and private providers (Chapter 8). The concluding chapter compares developments in the …