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.

Using GMM model and data from 11 Euro Area countries and 5 non-Euro countries over the period 1989 to 2011, we explore the nonlinear effects of financial development on the performance of Euro Area economy that is: its growth, capital accumulation, investment and productivity. Four measures of financial developments are examined, namely, liquidity, size, volatility and bank’s loans to private enterprises. Special consideration is devoted to modeling threshold effects of public debt that has increased substantially in recent years in several Euro countries. We found that the effect of stock market size is always positive whether we consider the level of real per capita income or its growth. However, the effect of banking sector, volatility, liquidity and public debt are generally negative. In addition, we find support for the channels of investment, saving, total factor productivity, and capital intensity. For all the four channels, the results indicate a significant negative link between banking development and volatility of stock returns. The impact of debt on growth seems to be negative with the turning point of public debt likely to be between 45-65%.

The purpose of this book is to analyse how investors can reduce the systematic risk of a portfolio of stocks by using equity index futures, and how the leverage effect of futures can help to seize a market opportunity to lift a portfolio's return. Another contribution is to introduce the reader to the practical handling of equity index futures transactions using Eurex's products.

Knowledge and creativity are increasingsly important factors for economic growth. Changes in the economic landscape mean that the location of human capacity becomes a key aspect for knowledge creation and regional economic growth. This article discusses the influence of political-economic structures and the importance of the creative human capital, in relation to the development and localisation of a government supported regional film industry in Sweden. The overall aim for initialising these regional film production centres is to enhance regional economic growth in new creative industrial sectors that can replace and/or supplement the traditional industry in the respective region. This article argues that this kind of creative industry is generally most likely to be mor successful in locations that can provide financial support and attract the key creative human capital. Regions with high population density and diversified economy will thereby be the best suited.

To survive and thrive in market economy, actors seek for continuous increased productivity and effectiveness. To do so, there is a dominant argument that concentration or clustering of economic activities might enhance economic performance and growth. In an increasingly global market, knowledge and creativity are often highlighted as increasingly important factors for economic growth in post-industrial societies. Changes in the economic landscape mean that the location of human capacity becomees a key aspect for knowledge creation and regional economic growth, especially for the development of the creative industry. In many EU countries, political institutions at various levels strive to assist the growth of, or even develop creative economic clusters. But is it possible, through political means, to actually construct a flourishing and sustainable creative industry clusters? And if so, is it possible to attract and/or develop the creative capital, the essential element for the development and growth of the creative industry. The article aims to critically discuss and further develop the conceptual discussion of creative capital, its relation in time and space, and thereby impact on regional economic growth. In an attempt to take the theoretical discussion a step forward, the creative capital theory will be critically analysed, where the author apply comparative studies to examine the impact of creative capital at national, regional and local level in a time-spatial context.  

Socio-economic development, in any society, includes many productive activities excluded in conventional economic analyses. This paper aims to critically uncover, explore and discuss how productive activities included in societal development are hidden by a monetary bias. By doing so, the paper strives to initiate a critical conceptual discussion related to what is generally indentified as weaknesses and relevant policies in regional development. The goal is to reach beyond convetional economic analyses to unlock and develop implications for conceptual models that can exted perceptions of societal development with its political, temporal and spatial meaning. The paper proceeds as follows: Firstly, through some illustrative empirical examples, uncover the meanings of ´economic´ activities from completely different contexts; Secondly, to explore the more general implications of a perspective/approach, inspired by Hägerstrand, which emphasizes political implications in time and space; Finally, to point out a conceptual discussion that enhances a broadened perspective for societal regional development that reaches beyond the conventional meanings of economic development.

In contemporary society, environmental problems are most often regarded as global phenomena that require international attention and solutions. However, global environmental problems can be regarded as symptoms and results of people´s daily activities at a local level where, the focus is on the household, defined as a space where individuals live together, where everyday life is organised and takes place. Interpretations and analyses of households and everyday life vary in different academic disciplinary contexts. Even in everyday language, different meanings are attributed to the term. The aim of this paper is to distinguish between, and discuss, understandings of the household as a physical dwelling, as a node of economic resource management, and finally as a social and emotional space. These three dimensions of everyday life are related to the three dimensions of sustainable development and an analysis that can indentify and integrate these dimensions can provide openings to enhance sustainable development processes combining the local and the global.

The global market economy is built on a political institutional arrangement promoting free and open trade. The existing natural and human resources make up the basis for all productive activities. The dominating economy strive to reach efficient use of human and natural resources, by enhancing processes of spatial expansion and time-compression.   The conceptual argument in this paper takes its starting point in Hägerstrand´s traditional time-space model. It illustrates two conflicting perspectives the global market economic horizontal norm (expansion in space, compression in time) and the environmental sustainable vertical processes (expansion over time in limited spaces). These two norms head in different directions and environmental sustainability is therefore conflicting with the common meaning of economic development.   In a time-spatial perspective, a sustainable use of resources is spatially limited, and extended over time. A development process, in terms of environmental sustainability, relies on local resource use and extension in time, to limit the use of external input of energy. This process is the opposite to what today is seen as economic development (growth) that compresses time and expands in space, to reach the most favourable comparative advantages.    The monetary market economy is a political construction. What activities and resources that are given a price on the market depend on the istitutional arrangements of property rights, prices and legal structures. Our conceptual conclusion is that the current political construction of the economy is "in-complete" and thus creates and fosters a mis-match with environmental pre-conditions. The political system can have the capacity to use the tools and power to harmonise economic development with environmental sustainability, locally, nationally and globally.

Today there is a development in Sweden towards reforming the public sector with the help of information technology (IT). The international name for this is eGovernment. This is a political decision aiming  not only for  increased IT-use in the public sector, but also for  the implementation of  an organizational change within the municipalities in Sweden. This has led to several Swedish municipalities customer centres having been established.

The main function of a municipal customer centre is to supply services to the citizens more efficiently by primarily using telephone and ICTtechnology in order to handle customer contacts. The employees at  the customer centres are educated in different subject  areas in order to being able to directly answer and solve routine questions and tasks from the citizens that are not too complicated without having to send the questions to the back office of the organisation. This paper aims to analyze some of the consequences for the citizens.

The empirical data comes  from four municipalities in Sweden and the research method of the study is qualitative (semi-structured telephone-interviews with citizens and recorded interviews with different personnel categories from three municipalities) . The analyzing model used is the “the MOA-model”. It was implemented in order to analyze the establishment’s focus on the customers and it was also used as this study’s  theoretical frame of reference.

The main result shows that the establishment of the customer centres is something positive from the  citizens’ point of view. E.g., the accessibility to the public municipal service has increased for most of the citizens and their experience of the delivered service via the telephone contacts was positive, as well as the registering of every issue with the customer centre which implies that the citizens can govern the needs for public municipality service. However, there are some negative aspects, e.g. the use of touch tone, and  there is still a risk of creating a digital divide, especially among  elderly citizens.

Keywords: Public customer centres, citizens, e-governance, municipality, New Public Management

Public e-services are technical innovations leading to organisational changes. The basic pre-conditions of e-services in the public sector differ in several perspectives from the private sector and e-commerce. For example when the “customers” are citizens instead of consumers the distribution of, access to and use of the services are different. Thus there are demands for developing general models and approaches to analyse as well as promote public e-services. Governmental e-services bring out innovative organisational changes based on how the public sector can meet the e-society and bridge over formerly unseen divides. However, such changes demand an innovative behaviour among actors in usually strictly and formally defined roles. 

    The conceptual model developed in this paper will discuss the differences of e-services, e-administration and e-democracy. Following on to this model an illustrative case of a public e-service on the Internet is presented analysed through the model. The e-service extending the geographical reach of public organisations is the Common application system for upper secondary school, in the regions of West Sweden and Östergötland in Sweden.

Communication and quality of service to the citizens are considered to be of utmost importance in today’s society. Even though the Swedish municipalities have a high level of self-regulation and freedom to organize communication and dialogue with their citizens in their own way, the Swedish government has expressed their demands of increased expectations by citing the potential of e-governance and high quality of service in order to increase the efficiency of the service to the citizens. To implement customer centres is one way to meet these demands. This paper offers a critical evaluation of consequences for Swedish citizens regarding the quality of service from the citizens’ perspective in a municipality where a new customer centre and e-services have been developed and established. The main research method is qualitative based upon analysis from interviews with different personnel categories of employees within the municipality. The results are also based on analysis of customer investigations. The results show that this implementation and developing of e-services are mostly positive for the quality of service to the citizens but there are also some weak aspects found.

Faced with a declining workforce, why does the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) oppose employer proposals for increased labor migration from non-EU countries? This article explores whether perspectives on policymaking in the varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature can account for this puzzle. VoC scholars maintain that policymakers prefer reforms conforming to the national political economy, improving firm capacity and ensuring better economic performance. Employers are also thought to support policies incentivecompatible with the prevailing model of capitalism. My analysis shows that while the SAP backed labor migration policies compatible with the Swedish coordinated market economy, it did not do so for reasons of efficiency or economic performance. The SAP fears that liberal reform, preferred by employers, will damage the Swedish model, undermine active labor market policies and weaken unions. The case of Swedish labor migration policy underscores how economic reform reflects political conflict and not the desire to preserve equilibrium.

The objective of this essay is to look at two cases where the debate rages regarding whether or not to restitute stolen art back to the states from which it was originally stolen. By looking at the debate in each country the essay focuses on gaining understanding in how one state might decide upon returning the cultural treasures and the other refuses to. In assisting the analysis of the debate, theories from social constructivism, norms and ideas of different national identities are assessed. More closely, this essay tries to examine the different ideas of national identity (Imperial Cosmopolitanism and Egalitarian Cosmopolitanism) and analyze the domestic interpretations of the international norm on restitution of plundered treasures that follow from these identities. In doing so, states of interest, Sweden and Great Britain, are chosen and the theoretical model for analysis developed by Bacchi (2010) will be used in order to present ―the problem‖, the causes to the problem and the solutions provided to solve the problem. Thereby, the essay aims to show how the actions, behavior and arguments of these states, in the question of restitution, are greatly dependant on the differences in the ideas of national identity that each state might possess or have inherited from past.

We explore the link between invention and innovation on the one hand and the level of economic activity and economic growth in Sweden by using patents granted and the quality of patens as our indicators of invention and innovation respectively. Our results indicate that both types of measures are able to explain the level and the changing levelof economic activity equally well. However, an important difference is that the economic activity is affected differently by the two measures. We find that inventions have the strongest marginal effect in regions where economic activity is the highest. Instead, innovations have similar marginal effects across regions with different economic activity. Our interpretation is that quality-adjusted patents sort out "bad" from "good" patents in a manner which reflect economic importance.

A contact service in a municipality is a place where the citizens can apply for processing of their claims concerning municipal jurisdiction. Examples could be application for a place at pre-school, planning permission or change of dustbin etc. The clerks at the contact centre should be able to provide immediate service in most of the matters. This requires the work-process for each matter to be known. Before starting of a contact service this knowledge existed in the administration for the actual claim. In many cases it was tacit and not described. This paper discusses the problem of making this knowledge explicit and described in order to be used at the contact service. Issues concerning work organisation, personnel and job satisfaction are recognised, but not in focus. Instead our focus lies on the work content, processing of the claims, which the clerks are dealing with. It is a qualitative study, based upon three existing contact services and one, which is in the design phase. We start with a brief discussion of different types of knowledge, related to classical epistemologies within the organisation area (Nonaka & Takeuchi, Brown & Duguid, Cook & Brown, Polyani, etc). Based upon empirical material from the cases we identify some typical knowledge categories. It might be general knowledge about rules, procedures and such things; it might be experience-based knowledge from previous claims, typical claims and work praxis developed over time. It might also be knowledge about the specific citizen and about the specific application. But it can also be totally new categories. Two categories we are pretty sure to identify are matter-oriented knowledge, concerning the actual matter and procedural knowledge, concerning the processing of the matter-oriented knowledge. In our previous research about work-flow four levels have been identified and we suspect the same basic reasoning might apply here.

This study focuses on a comparison of diOEerent kinds of Tobit models. According to the ® ndings, a simple Tobit I method can produce results that are similar to and in some cases better than much more sophisticated methods. This is especially true if the participation or index equation is incorrectly speci® ed.

The main purpose in this paper is to study to what extent accessibility to R&D can explain patent production. Therefore a knowledge production function is estimated both on aggregated level and for different industrial sectors. The output of the knowledge production is the number patent applications in Swedish municipalities from 1994 to 1999. 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. As often is the case with R&D outputs, the regional distribution of patents is highly skewed with influential outliers. The estimations are therefore conducted with quantile regressions. The main results on aggregated level indicate that high accessibility (local) to company R&D has the greatest positive effects on patent production. The effects are statistically significant for municipalities with a patent production corresponding to the median and to quantiles above the median. Local accessibility to university R&D is only of importance for certain industrial sectors and not on aggregated level. There is also evidence that intra-regional accessibility to company R&D affects patent production positively. A conclusion is that concentrated R&D investments in companies situated in municipalities with a high patenting activity would not only gain the municipalities themselves, but also the patent production in other municipalities in the functional region.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of national and international knowledge flows on innovative activity. Therefore a knowledge production function is estimated with patent applications in Swedish municipalities as the measure of innovation. The knowledge resources applied are R&D investments and high valued imports. In order to account for the importance of proximity, the knowledge resources are expressed as accessibilities. The total accessibility of a municipality is decomposed into local, intra-regional and inter-regional accessibility. The main results indicate that knowledge resources in a given municipality tend to have a positive effect on the innovative activity of another municipality, given that the municipalities belong to the same functional region. Thus, the results of the analysis indicate that knowledge flows transcend municipal borders, but that they tend to be bounded within functional regions. This result holds for both R&D investments and high valued import products.

The main focus of the thesis is on issues concerning production of knowledge. It is a common observation that knowledge activities have a tendency to agglomerate as well as to spill over in space. In order to incorporate geographical proximity, the thesis applies an accessibility approach in which actual travel time distances between locations are used to discount spatial knowledge spillovers. The thesis consists of three individual essays and a joint introduction. The first essay explores to what extent accessibility to R&D conducted at universities and companies can explain the number of patent applications in Swedish municipalities. The second essay analyses the relationship between knowledge accessibility and regional export performance. The knowledge resources used are R&D efforts and university educated labour. Since the distributions of the dependent variables are skewed with a few influential outliers, the estimations are conducted with quantile regressions. The empirical findings indicate that accessibility to university R&D has minor effects on patent production and export performance in Sweden. However, the other used inputs, i.e. accessibility to company R&D and accessibility to university educated labour, are of greater importance. The results also show that knowledge flows transcend municipal borders but that they tend to be bounded within functional regions. The third essay investigates how the inclusion of accessibility variables, i.e. spatially lagged explanatory variables, affects the extent of spatial autocorrelation. The basic proposition is that the inclusion of inputs external to the spatial observation as separate variables reveals spatial dependencies via the parameter estimates. This is confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations. The Monte Carlo Simulations also indicate that problems with spatial autocorrelation and biased parameter estimates are reduced.

Using the taxonomy by Anselin (2003), this paper investigates how the inclusion of spatially discounted variables on the ‘right-hand-side’ (RHS) in empirical spatial models affects the extent of spatial autocorrelation. The basic proposition is that the inclusion of inputs external to the spatial observation in question as a separate variable reveals spatial dependence via the parameter estimate. One of the advantages of this method is that it allows for a direct interpretation. The paper also tests to what extent significance of the estimated parameters of the spatially discounted explanatory variables can be interpreted as evidence of spatial dependence. Additionally, the paper advocates the use of the accessibility concept for spatial weights. Accessibility is related to spatial interaction theory and can be motivated theoretically by adhering to the preference structure in random choice theory. Monte Carlo Simulations show that the coefficient estimates of the accessibility variables are significantly different from zero in the case of modelled effects. The rejection frequency of the three typical tests (Moran’s I, LM-lag and LM-err) is significantly reduced when these additional variables are included in the model. When the coefficient estimates of the accessibility variables are statistically significant, it suggests that problems of spatial autocorrelation are significantly reduced. Significance of the accessibility variables can be interpreted as spatial dependence

Knowledge is maintained as a core variable for growth in a large set of contemporary theories. In this paper we have analyzed the relationship between knowledge accessibility and regional growth. The knowledge resource used in our model is R&D conducted at universities and in companies. A precise definition of accessibility was introduced and calculations were based on actual travel time distances. Using data at the municipality level in Sweden, the hypothesis that knowledge accessibility has a positive effect on growth cannot be rejected. The knowledge accessibility in a given period has a statistically significant effect on the growth in value-added per employee in subsequent periods.

The total accessibility of a municipality was divided into three types (i) intramunicipal accessibility, (ii) intra-regional accessibility and (iii) extra-regional accessibility. The paper has shown that this division gives a clear indication of that there is spatial dependence in the sense that the knowledge resources in a given municipality tend to have a positive effect on the growth of another municipality, conditional on that the municipalities belongs to the same functional region. Thus, the results of the analysis indicate that knowledge flows transcend municipal borders, but that they tend to be bounded within functional regions.

The findings in the paper provide support for the theories that emphasize the role of knowledge for growth. However, the paper demonstrates that spatial proximity to knowledge resources is important to materialize the positive effect of such resources. Accessibility to knowledge in space is thus imperative.

This paper examines the effects of regional R&D on patenting for Sweden within an accessibility framework. We use two measures of patenting: number of patents granted per capita and a composite of quality-adjusted patents which we regard as an innovation indicator, respectively. Three conclusions emerge. First, we find that the specification where innovations per capita is used as a dependent variable performs much better than with granted patents per capita for capturing relationships with regional R&D. In fact, quantile regressions over the distribution of different patenting and innovation levels per capita show that R&D efforts within regions affect innovations per capita positively, except for the regions with the lowest levels of R&D. The effetcs on granted patents per capita are less robust and depend inconsistently on the level of R&D. Secondly, accessibility to inter-regional R&D do not affect innovation significantly in our results, which suggests that effects are locally bounded. This implies that studies of the R&D-innovation relationship are plagued by misspecification, since studies tend to show that R&D-effects diffuse to other regions. This is also the case in our study: the inter-regional effects are an important factor for granted patents. Third, the share of university R&D of all regional R&D has no effect on patenting, which suggests that the two types of R&D are substitutes. In view of these results the redommendation must be to use quality-adjusted patents for regional innovation studies rather than patent grants.

New technologies have always teased the imagination of avant-garde artists on how to challenge existing cultural paradigms. For instance, experience design for the creative industries of today provides exciting challenges with a potential to innovate practices and creating new ways of interaction between the artist and her audience. In an ongoing research project we aim at framing the design space for virtual experiences. The paper presents and discusses the role of technology in such context and use three ongoing case studies where ICT has been used to augment and support consumers of cultural experiences. The analysis shows how technology-driven interventions are less oriented towards radical change compared to interventions that are rooted in their nondigital origins.

Accessibility has for many years been a widely used tool in transportation research. Many definitions have been suggested and researchers have constructed numerous mathematical formulations to measure its value in order to be able to evaluate the relationships between the nature of the transport systems and the patterns of land use. Such correlations have been used especially in assessing existing transport systems and forecasting their performance to provide decision-makers with ideas about the need for investments in the transport systems. However, accessibility measures can be regarded as the spatial counterparts of discounting. The measures represent the spatial distribution of economic agents and their activities in a simple way that imposes a very clear structure upon the relationship between these agents and their activities and their environment. Various frictional effects arising from geographical distance between economic agents determine their interaction options, that is, their options to trade, to cooperate, to learn, to commute, and so on. Observing that the time sensitivities of the economic agents vary between different spatial scales (and between different economic activities) we may impose a spatial structure (for example, local, intra-regional, interregional and international) which offers opportunities to define variables in such a way that spatial dependencies can be accommodated. These newly defined variables can then be used in empirical explanations of various spatial phenomena, such as patent output, new firm formation, the emergence of new export products, and economic growth in different spatial units. We will in this chapter against this background show that accessibility is an underused analytical and empirical tool in regional science with an underestimated potential.