This paper aims at analyzing the obstacles to in-depth cooperation between Swedish universities and other parts of society. Social capital is used as a comprehensive concept for the norms, values and relations that exist in the university sector and between this sector and the surrounding...

Gender equality has long been a focus in regional development in the European Union. In a Swedish context, the interest has been borne from the fact that rural and sparsely populated areas have a 'women shortage', and that this tendency is accelerating as young women move to cities, while young...

Increased productivity is one of the main drivers of economic growth. Considering the increasing importance of the service sector in many economies studies of productivity in service firms are essential, but still rare. Questions concerning the underlying reasons for productivity differences in...

This paper offers critical aspects on this ongoing development within the Swedish municipalities with the strategic use of ICT , for the purpose to create a digital government and to making public administration more citizen-oriented, efficient, and responsive to the needs of the public. It aims...

The current empirical entrepreneurship literature mainly shows a positive correlation between entrepreneurship (measured as the number of startups) and economic growth. However, the mechanisms by which entrepreneurship exerts its positive influence are not obvious. The net result of startups on...

This paper follows the industry employment histories of all individuals at some point affiliated with the declining German and dismantling Swedish shipbuilding industries 1970-2000. We analyse the situation of the individual workers leaving shipbuilding through investigating to what extent they...

There is an abundant literature on industrial ecology aiming at explaining the survival propensity of recently started firms. The majority of the contributions concentrate on the characteristics of the entrepreneur, the new firm or the industry. Only a small minority of the existing studies...

The empirical analysis of firm growth is a classical field in industrial economics. Insights into the determinants of firm growth are particularly interesting for mature markets. A typical example of a mature market is the lodging industry in high-income countries, characterised by a high degree...

This paper analyses the effect of innovation on the well-established productivity-export association in the literature. Here, we argue that actively innovative firms have a higher productivity, which make them more likely to become exporters. Moreover, exporting firms learn from their trading...

In this study we evaluate a special form of business support - support to cover costs associated with business counselling. The policy question is whether firms that receive this support within the Regional Business Development programme have a positive outcome compared with firms that do not...