Managing money in British and Swedish households

Abstract

Using data from two large-scale surveys, this article compares methods of money management within households in two countries with different levels of women’s economic dependency and different ideologies of breadwinning, namely Britain and Sweden. The results show that while the joint pool was similar in both countries in being associated with the most egalitarian patterns of control over and access to money, Swedish couples using other allocative systems were characterised by more egalitarian financial practices than their British counterparts. We then go on to explore the main predictors of money management in the two countries, showing that while previous research has tended to focus on women’s economic contribution to the household, ideologies or discourses also play a crucial role in contributing to the handling of money within marriage. In both countries the most egalitarian method of money management was associated with women contributing a significant proportion of total household income (relative to the man) and with ideologies or discourses of co-provision. We therefore conclude that resource and cultural theories need to be treated less as alternative explanations and more as complementary trends, since economic and cultural factors are interrelated and reinforce each other in broadly similar ways in the two countries.