Hundreds of youth have torched cars and attacked police in four nights of riots in immigrant suburbs of Sweden's capital, shocking a country that dodged the worst of the financial crisis but failed to solve youth unemployment and resentment among asylum seekers…

"We see a society that is becoming increasingly divided and where the gaps, both socially and economically, are becoming larger," said Rami Al-khamisi, co-founder of Megafonen, a group that works for social change in the suburbs.

"And the people out here are being hit the hardest ... We have institutional racism."…

"The reason is very simple. Unemployment, the housing situation, disrespect from police," said Rouzbeh Djalaie, editor of the local Norra Sidan newspaper, which covers Husby. "It just takes something to start a riot, and that was the shooting."…

After decades of practicing the "Swedish model" of generous welfare benefits, Stockholm has been reducing the role of the state since the 1990s, spurring the fastest growth in inequality of any advanced OECD economy.

While average living standards are still among the highest in Europe, successive governments have failed to substantially reduce long-term youth unemployment and poverty, which have affected immigrant communities worst.

Some 15 percent of the population are foreign-born, and unemployment among these stands at 16 percent, compared with 6 percent for native Swedes, according to OECD data.

Youth unemployment in Husby, at 6 percent, is twice the overall average across the capital…

While many of the immigrant population are from Nordic neighbors closely tied to Sweden by language or culture, the debate has tended to focus on poor asylum seekers from distant war zones.

Out of a total 103,000 immigrants last year, 43,900 were asylum seekers, almost 50 percent up from 2011. Nearly half of these were refugees from fighting in Syria, Afghanistan or Somalia, and will get at least temporary residency.

Among 44 industrialized countries, Sweden ranks fourth in the absolute number of asylum seekers, and second relative to its population, according to U.N. figures.

The youth policy approach is still cross-sectoral. This means that within each area of politics that touches upon youth related topics, visible efforts should be made to integrate the youth policy perspective within the already existing goals of that specific political area. To fulfil these two main goals, analysis, coordination and presentation should be made within the following five areas:

• Education and training
• Work and self-support
• Health and vulnerability
• Influence and representation
• Culture and leisure-time

Different aspects of the living conditions of young people are not easy to formulate as measurable goals and hence should not be formulated as goals. However, young people’s living conditions should be important starting points for how public services are planned and used as points of reference when these services are being evaluated. The Government sees four perspectives that should characterize both the policy and public services for young people. These are the resource perspective, the rights perspective, the independence perspective and the diversity perspective.

Government agencies in charge of different policy areas have to follow up youth related issues as an integrated part of their ordinary follow up of their field of work. A number of youth policy relevant indicators have however been identified in different policy areas such as work, education, housing, health, etc. These are to be reported each year to the responsible ministry and to the Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs.