Suchergebnisse

There is a widespread perception that present-day Nordic egalitarianism is the outcome of a long historical continuity, where the strong political position of peasant farmers and weak feudalism were marking characteristics of pre-industrial society. However, little empirical evidence so far exists on the distribution of income for the early modern period. In this paper, we draw on the schedule and individual assessments devised by the authorities to distribute the tax-burden associated with the Älvsborg ransom to estimate income inequality and the share of income accruing to top income earners and to different social groups in the Swedish realm (present-day Sweden and Finland) in 1613. Using this information, we are able to speak to several debates on pre-industrial distribution of income and historical inequality in the Nordic countries. We find that the income share of the richest one percent was 13 percent while the share of the top 0.01 percent stood at 2 percent. Sweden was characterized by a two- pronged social structure where a large share of income was held by the absolute top as well as by the peasants who made up the majority of the population, while the nobility, clergy, burghers and other middle-rank groups held relatively small income shares not least due to their small population numbers. This finding helps explain the relatively strong position of peasants as a fourth estate within the early modern Swedish parliament. While Sweden in the early seventeenth century was relatively equal compared to other contemporary societies, the egalitarian social structure was upended over the subsequent centuries resulting in vast economic and political inequality by the late nineteenth century. Thus, there is no apparent continuity between early modern equality and post-WW2 egalitarianism.

The 2017 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research is given to Hernando de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru. Over the last 30 years, Hernando de Soto has been a world-leading intellectual engaged in academic and public policy discussions on global development. He has made substantial contributions to our understanding of the informal economy and of the importance of property rights to unleash entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty and underdevelopment. His contributions have led to a new and better understanding of the role played by institutions in supporting entrepreneurship, especially in the Third World. Hernando de Soto's work has also had major influences on policy worldwide, both in terms of conceptual understanding and practical policy measures. © 2017 The Author(s) ; open access

Several hundred new synthetic drugs, novel psychoactive substances (NPS) or "legal highs" have in recent years appeared on the drug market. These can effortlessly be obtained from on-line vendors, offering an easy access to a plethora of new and untested substances, often with unknown or dangerous effects. Several different attempts to reduce the availability of NPS and to prevent accidents and fatalities have been applied by governments around the world. Nonetheless this complex and constantly evolving situation provides palpable dilemmas and challenges to legislators and prevention strategists. One unintended consequence from prohibition and current drug policies occurs when possibly more precarious substances are used to substitute older and more well-known illicit drugs; so called "substance displacement". We have performed extensive research on the use of NPS, by analyzing Internet resources (drug discussion forum, on-line questionnaires), and published several NPS studies. During our research we observed how substance displacement is a common issue, with implications for both clinical practices, drug prevention strategies, as well as for legislators. In the present review we discuss two common themes of substance displacement: 1) Synthetic cannabinoids replace herbal cannabis, and 2) Different attempts for self-medication using NPS. Incitements for substance displacement, that exposes the user to possibly more harmful substances, are founded both in legislation (availability of substances and fear of legal repercussions) as well as from certain policies or cultural perceptions of various medical conditions. We offer no obvious solutions to these complications, but would like to contribute to awareness of how these factors effects drug users and how measures intended to reduce harm in many cases have the opposite effects. Further studies on the divergent motivations and different groups of NPS users are highlighted as imperative to find new and realistic solutions going forward.

AbstractA broad body of scholarly work claims that Africans in settler colonies were economically marginalised as an intended consequence of colonial policies. What is not recognized in this literature is that institutions might instigate a multitude of social forces, some of them in unexpected directions. This paper takes the case of Southern Rhodesia—a typical African settler economy—to add to this discussion by shedding light on a largely discounted economic phenomenon, namely the rise of commercially oriented Africans. We argue that the relative success of this group can largely be understood as an unintended consequence of settler‐oriented colonial institutions. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACT  This paper focuses upon the ways in which characteristics of regions in regards to knowledge sources, communication opportunities, and absorptive capacity influence the development of innovation ideas among existing and potential entrepreneurs. We formulate a model where entrepreneurs or innovating firms introduce new products in a quasi‐temporal setting. Market conditions are characterised by monopolistic competition between varieties belonging to the same product group, in which there is entry and exit of varieties. A stochastic process is assumed to generate new innovation ideas as time goes by, and a firm (entrepreneur) who receives such an idea has to transform the idea to an innovation, which in the model is specified as a particular variety combined with a specific destination market. The theoretical model is used as a reference when formulating two regression models, with which we estimate how a set of regional characteristics are associated with the likelihood of innovation ideas across Swedish local labour market regions. In one model, we examine the emergence of new export varieties, and in the second model, we investigate the appearance of new export firms. Results are consistent with the assumption that knowledge and information flows have a positive influence on the frequency of arrival of innovation ideas to firms.

At the same time as we can observe strong tendencies of a globalisation of R&D, we also can observe a strong spatial clustering of R&D and related innovative activities. The standard explanation in the literature of the clustering of innovative activities is that such clusters offer external knowledge economies to innovative companies, since they are dependent upon knowledge flows and that knowledge flows are spatially bounded. Obviously, location is crucial in understanding knowledge flows and knowledge production, since knowledge sources have been found to be geographically concentrated. There are two major performers of R&D: industry and universities. It seems rather straight-forward to assume that industrial R&D might be attracted to locate near research universities doing R&D in fields relevant to industry. Already as far back as in the 1960s a number of case studies confirmed the important roles played by Stanford University and MIT for commercial innovation and entrepreneurship. During the years a large number of formal studies have presented evidences of a positive impact of university R&D on firm performance. The question is, does it also work the other way around? Does industrial R&D function as an attractor for university R&D? We may actually think of several reasons why university R&D may grow close to industry R&D. First of all political decision-makers may decide to start or expand university R&D at locations where industry already is doing R&D. Secondly, we can imagine that industry doing R&D in a region might use part of their R&D funds to finance university R&D. Thirdly, universities in regions with industrial R&D might find it easier to attract R&D funds from national and international sources due to co-operation with industry. Obviously, not all types of university R&D attract industrial R&D. There are reasons to believe that, in particular, university R&D in natural, technical and medical sciences attracts industrial R&D but that there are also strong reasons to believe that there are variations between different sectors of industry regarding how dependent their R&D is to be located close to university R&D. The above implies that there are behavioural relationships between industrial R&D and university R&D and vice versa. However, the litrature contains few studies dealing with this problem. Most studies have concentrated on the one-directional effect from university R&D to industrial R&D and the outputs of industrial R&D in most cases measured in terms of the number of patents and neglected the possible mutual interaction. However, if there is a mutual interaction between university and industry R&D, and if there are knowledge externalities involved, then we can develop a dynamic explanation to the clustering of innovative activities based on positive feedback loops. This would imply strong tendencies to path dependency and that policy initiatives to transfer non-innovative regions to innovative regions would have small chances to succeed. The fact that knowledge flows seem to be spatially bounded implies that proximity matters. Most contributions analysing spatial knowledge flows have used very crude measures of proximity. However, there are some authors that have argued that proximity could be measured using accessibility measures. Accessibility measures can be used to model interaction opportunities at different spatial scales: local, intra-regional and inter-regional. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the locational relationship between industry R&D and university R&D in Sweden using a simultaneous equation approach and to analyse existing differences between different science areas and different industry sectors.