Coping with regional inequality in Sweden: structural change, migrations, and policy, 1860–2000
Kerstin Enflo and
Joan Rosés
Economic History Review, 2015, vol. 68, issue 1, 191-217
Abstract:
type="main">
In many countries, regional income inequality has followed an inverted U-shaped curve, growing during industrialization and market integration and declining thereafter. By contrast, Sweden's regional inequality dropped from 1860 to 1980 and did not exhibit this U-shaped pattern. Accordingly, today's regional income inequality in Sweden is lower than in other European countries. We note that the prime mover behind the long-run reduction in regional income differentials was structural change, whereas neoclassical and technological forces played a relatively less important role. However, this process of regional income convergence can be divided into three major periods. During the first period (1860–1940), the unrestricted action of market forces, particularly the expansion of markets and high rates of internal and international migration, led to the compression of regional income differentials. During the next period (1940–80), regional convergence was even more intense. In this period, institutional arrangements favoured the reduction of productivity differentials across industries and successive governments aided the reallocation of the workforce from declining to thriving regions and economic sectors. During the last period (1980–2000), when regional incomes diverged, internal migration and structural change slowed. Furthermore, the development of knowledge-intensive service industries favoured economic growth in the main metropolitan areas.
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1468-0289.12049 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: Coping with regional inequality in Sweden: structural change, migrations and policy, 1860-2000 (2012)
Working Paper: Coping with Regional Inequality in Sweden: Structural Change, Migrations and Policy, 1860-2000 (2012)
Working Paper: Coping with Regional Inequality in Sweden: Structural Change, Migrations and Policy, 1860-2000 (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ehsrev:v:68:y:2015:i:1:p:191-217
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0117
Access Statistics for this article
Economic History Review is currently edited by Stephen Broadberry
More articles in Economic History Review from Economic History Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery (contentdelivery@wiley.com).