The main purpose in this paper is to study to what extent accessibility to R&D is an important factor of explaining municipal economic growth. Of special interests is the question whether, the effect of company (private) R&D efforts on economic growth differ if a university college is present in the municipality or not. Therefore the empirical analysis is conducted on a reduced dataset (92 out of 290 municipalities), containing only middle-sized municipalities without traditional ´old´ universities. The idea of the selection process was to find two sets of comparable municipalities with one containing municipalities with university colleges and one with municipalities without university colleges. In the empirical analysis a knowledge production function is estimated with the difference in Gross Municipal Product, GMP, between 1993 and 2001 as the output. In order to account for the importance of proximity, the explanatory variables are expressed as accessibilities to university and company R&D. The total accessibility is then decomposed into local, intra-regional and inter-regional accessibility to R&D. The main results show that local and intra-regional accessibility to company R&D has positive effects on economic growth. On the other hand, local accessibility to university R&D is of no importance, while there are influential effects of intra-regional university R&D. Moreover, the presence of university college R&D activities decreases the importance of the local accessibilitiy to company R&D or put it differently, local accessibility to company R&D is more important in municipalitites without university college activities.