| 1. |
- Bohlin, Jan, 1952, et al.
(författare)
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Protectionism, agricultural prices and relative factor incomes: Sweden´s wage-rental ratio, 1877-1926
- 2006
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Trends in wage-rental ratios have figured prominently in the recent literature on factor price convergence and globalisation in the late nineteenth century. In that literature Sweden has been described as a free trade country whose wage-rental ratio exhibited a distinguished upward trend before World War I. This article presents a new series of land prices which indicates an increase in land rentals and an evolution of the wage-rental ratio more in line with other European protectionist countries. We explore the determinants of the Swedish wage-rental ratio and assess the relative importance of protectionism and the change in the product mix from arable to animal products in Swedish agriculture.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Bohlin, Jan, 1952
(författare)
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Tariff protection in Sweden 1885 - 1914
- 2005
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper presents disaggregated estimates of nominal and effective rates of tariff protection for Sweden 1885 - 1914. In a methodological part of the article I argue that the proper way to measure tariff protection is an output weighted average of tariff rates for a representative sample of commodities. In the empirical part of the paper, I show that Swedish tariff protection increased substantially in the period even though tariff income as a proportion of total imports decreased slightly. This seeming contradiction is explained by the restructuring of Swedish imports that took place in the period under review; the share in imports of highly protected consumer goods declined while the share of capital goods with lower protection rates and duty free raw materials and input goods increased. The result stands in contradiction to some recent views expressed in the international literature.
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| 4. |
- Bohlin, Jan, 1952
(författare)
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The income distributional consequences of agrarian tariffs in Sweden on the eve of World War I
- 2006
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- After 1870 Swedish agriculture was transformed in the direction of more animal husbandry. Small farmers in particular specialized in animal produce. Yet, agricultural protectionism primarily served the interest of large landowners specializing in bread-grain production. The paper explores the impact of agrarian tariffs on the factor rewards of landowners, capitalists and workers. Landowners predictably benefited from agrarian tariffs, the more so if they specialized in bread-grain, as did rural workers. With an integrated ruralurban labour market real incomes of urban workers would have come under pressure if agrarian tariffs had been dismantled while capitalists would have been little affected.
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| 5. |
- Broberg, Oskar, 1976
(författare)
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Verkstadsindustri i globaliseringens tidevarv. En studie av SKF och Volvo 1970-2000
- 2006
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This working paper explores the impact of the globalization process 1970-2000 on two manufacturing industries in the Gothenburg area â?? SKF and Volvo. Three aspects of the process are highlighted: the development of new Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the increased mobility of capital, and the increased importance of knowledge in manufacturing industry. The history of the two companies is analyzed from the early 1970s to the turn of the century, using literature and interviews. Firstly, the paper explores the organizational development of the two companies. The study shows how SKF and Volvo during these years transformed from being organized as nationally oriented hierarchies to become nodes in global networks. Secondly, a number of specific themes are explored, such as ownership, branding, R&D, and outsourcing. The international ownership increased and the production is now coordinated on a global scale. The main conclusion of this working paper is that SKF and Volvo are representatives of an emerging informational economy. The flexibility generated by new ICT and more liquid financial markets has proven to promote economic growth, while at the same time generate social conflicts as the labour security decreases.
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| 6. |
- Granér, Staffan, 1961
(författare)
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Thy neighbour´s property. Communal property rights and institutional change in an iron producing forest district of Sweden 1630-1750
- 2005
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper focuses on the development of property rights to village com-mons, as they appear in the court rolls of a legal district in Sweden in the late 17th and the early 18th century. A development of agrarian property rights, from comparably attenuated towards more exclusive and private ones, has been considered one of the most important and crucial aspects of economic modernisation. To explain and analyse this development two, not necessarily incompatible, theoretical approaches can be identified. The neo-institutional property rights approach focuses on economising behav-iour among individual agents in relation to factors such as enforcement and transaction costs, relative prices, market integration and contracts. A more sociological, or class based, property relations approach focuses on factors such as power structure, distribu-tion, exploitation and social networks. In this area the regulation and privatisation of access to commonly controlled woodlands and pastures plays an important role. Immi-gration, population growth, colonisation, and a rapid establishment of iron mills in the 1690â??s, contributed to a commercialisation of economic relations, and to an increased scarcity of commonly managed resources such as wood, charcoal and waterpower. This put considerable strain on traditional local conceptions of rights. A significant part of the legal cases reflects disputes over rights to village commons and the resources that they contain. The long-run result of this process could be described as a kind of enclosure where communal and socially embedded rights were gradually redefined.
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| 7. |
- Hallén, Per, 1969
(författare)
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Levnadsstandarden speglad i bouppteckningar : En undersökning av två metoder att använda svenska bouppteckningar för en levnadsstandardsundersökning samt en internationell
- 2007
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The standard of living in the pre-industrial world is an interesting but challenging subject. No single method alone can solve the problem. In order to grasp the standard of living several methods must be used, and work must be done across discipline borderlines. In this paper I discuss methods for using post mortal inventories (estate inventories) in order to indicate the material standard of living in Sweden. Similar methods have been used in France, Great Britain and North America. To adapt these methods to Swedish conditions have been the main focus of the paper. The first method tested here uses the valuation of all objects stated in the post mortal inventory (not including houses and farms). This method had previously been tested on English and North American inventories. All values in the Swedish material have been converted to British pounds in order to facilitate comparisons. The second method tested uses the objects in the estate inventory to create an index of the material standard of living. This index was first used in France and later in Canada. Some preliminary results in this work indicate that Swedish farmers by 1750 were well below English and French farmers in material standard of living. However, during the fifty years that followed a noticeable change took place.
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| 8. |
- Kahn, Martin, 1969
(författare)
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A decisive intelligence failure? British intelligence on Soviet war potential and the 1939 Anglo-French-Soviet alliance that never was
- 2008
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In 1939 the British Government tried to assess Soviet war potential in order to know more about their potential ally, as part of the negotiations concerning an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance. British assessments of Soviet economic and military strength (and the internal stability of the Stalin regime) in this context have partly been neglected in earlier research, and it seems both that British estimates were much more off the mark than earlier supposed, and that the gross underestimation of Soviet strength in 1939 was probably a major factor in the British reluctance to enter into an anti-Hitler coalition with the USSR.
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| 9. |
- Larsson, Svante, 1974
(författare)
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Globalisation, inequality and Swedish catch up in the late nineteenth century. Williamson´s real wage comparisons under scrutiny
- 2005
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The idea of rapid factor price convergence in the latter half of the nineteenth century stems from an article from 1995 by Jeffrey Williamson. That article presented real wage comparisons of unskilled urban workers for seventeen countries. Sweden, along with the rest of Scandinavia, appeared to be an influential case in accounting for much of the alleged factor price convergence taking place. This paper takes a closer look at all the three steps that have to be accomplished in order to establish real wage comparisons focusing on Sweden in relation to the US and the UK. The most important finding is twofold. First, that the US-Sweden wage gap is considerably smaller for industrial than for building workers, and second, that the rate at which Sweden´s real wages approached the American and the British has been overestimated. Swedish real wages did grow rapidly, but not as rapidly as Williamson´s comparison will have us to believe, because his real wage series does not constitute a representative account of the Swedish real wage experience. I argue that as we suffer from a serious paucity of data for narrow and thereby comparable selections of unskilled workers resorting to encompassing wage measures is a more viable option.
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| 10. |
- Rönnbäck, Klas, 1974
(författare)
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Flexibility and protectionism. Swedish trade in sugar during the early modern era
- 2006
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Sugar was of the utmost importance for the development of a transatlantic trade during the early modern era. This working paper explores the impact of institutions and institutional changes of the colonial trade in sugar focusing on one country on the European semi-periphery, namely Sweden. Through protectionist policies, Swedish merchants were able to catch a significant share of the Baltic trade in colonial goods, despite the country having no colonies of its own. This in turn enabled a diversification of the sources of colonial goods. Trade in sugar became highly flexible during the period, rapidly changing in response to a changing international market. Protectionist policies also enabled the development of a domestic sugar manufacture, which flourished during the late 18th and early 19th century. When Swedish trade policy was liberalized around the 1850s, the domestic industry went through hard times from the international competition. The introduction of sugar beet would however have even more far-reaching consequences for the international trade in sugar. Swedish sugar imports collapsed by more than 98 per cent in less than ten years when domestic production of sugar beet had gotten off to a start at the end of the 19th century. The preliminary conclusions form the first output from the work on a thesis concerned with the trade in colonial goods of actors in the European semi-periphery. One future aim is to compare the colonial trade in sugar of Sweden and Denmark.
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