Suchergebnisse

Can subsidies to domestic producers, de facto, be subsidies to foreign producers? If so, state aid may distort competition to the advantage of the foreign producers. At the same time, governments often oppose subsidies elsewhere, claiming that their industry is hurt. The possibility that governments fight subsidies on these grounds, although the effects are to the contrary, constitutes what is called 'the state aid paradox' that is discussed throughout the paper. The dispute over regionally differentiated payroll tax rates between Norway and the surveillance authority of the European Free Trade Association (ESA) is used as a motivating example. The dispute is analysed by means of a simple general equilibrium model. The approach is partly analytical and partly numerical. There are three regions represented in the model: the assisted periphery, the assisting core, and the world outside, interpreted here as the European Union (EU). It will be demonstrated that although the assisted periphery will be losing market shares if state aid is ended, so will possibly EU in all markets.

This paper contributes to the recent literature on sustainability in the Arctic as a political concept. Parliamentary proceedings have increasingly been recognized as an important source of information for eliciting political issues. In this paper, we use unsupervised text mining techniques to analyze parliamentary speeches for Norway from the period from 2009 to 2016 to answer whether political coalitions talk differently about sustainability in the Arctic depending on being in opposition or government. We find that the difference between being in government and opposition, controlling for political label (left-right), is far more important than the difference between left and right, controlling for role (opposition-government). The results suggest that in the trade-off between political preferences and election success, the balance is tilted in favour of the latter. Our interpretation is that opportunistic behavior seems to dominate partisan behavior in the politics related to sustainability in the Arctic.

Regional convergence studies have relied on net migration data in assessing the impact of migration. With heterogeneous labour, the implied symmetrical treatment of immigration and emigration cannot be justified a priori. Because of heterogeneity among migrants, gross migration flows may lead to considerable interregional redistribution of human capital even when net migration is zero. Moreover, the effects of regional economic conditions on gross in- and out-migration flows may not be symmetric. In this comparative study of regional growth and migration, the net and the gross migration approaches are compared. The results confirm ex post that the net approach cannot be justified and, despite Sweden and Norway being similar in many ways, migration has very different effects on convergence in these two countries.

The European Union (EU) has recognized that universities and research institutes play a critical role in regional Smart Specialisation processes. Our research aims to identify thematic cross-border research domains across space and disciplines in Arctic Scandinavia. We identify potential domains using an unsupervised machine-learning technique (topic modelling). We uncover latent topics based on similarities in the vocabulary of research papers. The proposed methodology can be utilized to identify common research domains across regions and disciplines in almost real time, thereby acting as a decision support system to facilitate cooperation among knowledge producers.