National patterns and the regulation of railways and telephony in the Nordic Countries up to 1950

• It has been suggested that the railways, as the first national industrialization project, became role models for public regulatory solutions in other industries in the same country.  However, it still has to be explored if the institutional arrangements have actually been transferred from the railways to other industries. Comparative country analysis may increase our understanding of how institutions changes and eventually are ‘inherited’ by other industries. In this paper the question of whether or not the bias of the railway policy in the various Nordic countries found its way into a later emerging network industry, the telephone industry is discussed. The result shows that even as similar railway regulations emerged in the Nordic countries from the 1920s, the regulation of the telephone industries did not emerge along the same lines. Here, two different regulatory trajectories were established, one in Sweden and Norway and another one in Denmark and Finland. Here other factors such as for instance political bargaining power and national and regional development strategies must be taken into consideration.

Keyword

Economic history

institutional change

railways

telephony

Nordic countries

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)