Sweden administrative state adds 37% more staff since 2008

Sweden’s finance minister Elisabeth Svantesson has declared that next year’s “reform space” is essentially gone—after a mandate of spending to bolster household purchasing power and, more defensibly, rearmament. That is precisely when governments are supposed to discover the lost art of saying no. Instead, Sweden’s administrative state appears to treat every fiscal squeeze as a marketing challenge.

In a column for Dagens Industri, Bean Khalil draws on a new Timbro report—aptly titled “22 bureaucrats a day”—arguing that the growth engine inside the Swedish state is not tanks or patrol officers, but the expanding layers of administration that orbit any political priority. According to the report’s author Adam Danieli, the number of central-government employees rose 37% from 2008 to 2024, from roughly 190,000 to 260,000, while the population grew about 15%. Municipal employment increased 18% over the same period. Sweden also stands out versus Denmark, Finland and Norway, where government staffing has tracked population growth more closely.

The point is not that government can never hire anyone. It is that institutions with guaranteed funding and weak feedback loops will expand until they hit an external constraint—usually debt, inflation, or a voter revolt—then rebrand that constraint as “underfunding.” Khalil notes that the real red flag is growth in agencies whose core missions have not meaningfully expanded.

Timbro estimates the annual cost of the administrative expansion at about SEK 50 billion—roughly Sweden’s aid budget. One emblematic case is the National Agency for Education (Skolverket): staffing reportedly up 148% over 14 years, yet it still failed to deliver digital national exams, forcing a return to paper-based substitutes. In a functioning market, that combination—headcount explosion plus delivery failure—would be called bankruptcy, not “lessons learned.”

The government’s own Productivity Commission has echoed the concern, warning that large bureaucratic “colossi” can drag on GDP growth. Its diagnosis, as summarized by Khalil, is that growth has disproportionately flowed into administrative capacity: more reporting, more compliance, more cross-cutting goals, more internal control functions—often justified by the very proliferation of rules and performance indicators politicians impose. The state, in other words, hires people to manage the paperwork generated by the state’s demand for paperwork.

Khalil is scathing about the kind of “reform” that merely shuffles boxes on an org chart. A recent review of the 50 smallest government agencies largely ended in mergers—such as folding the tiny Handicrafts Committee into the Swedish Arts Council—meaning staff changed badges, not incentives.

The proposed remedy is brutally simple: slash the mission creep. Both Timbro and the Productivity Commission urge government to purge the overstuffed task lists it assigns agencies, focus on measurable core duties, and actually close agencies Sweden can do without. In an era when the treasury claims it has no room left, SEK 50 billion is not a rounding error—it is the price of a machine that, left alone, will keep expanding while promising efficiency in the next press release.