Knowledge Accessibility and Regional Economic Growth

Martin Andersson () and Charlie Karlsson ()

No 40, Working Paper Series in Economics and Institutions of Innovation from Royal Institute of Technology, CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the relationship between knowledge accessibility and regional economic growth in Sweden. The research question we ask in this paper is the following: can the variation between regions in knowledge accessibility in a given period explain the variation in the growth performance of Swedish regions in the following period? A main assumption in the paper is that the potential for human interaction a various spatial scales transforms into potential knowledge flows. Based upon an endogenous growth framework we show how the potential for knowledge flows at different spatial scales can be modelled using an accessibility approach. An advantage of modelling the interaction potentials at different spatial scales is that we in principle takes care of the spatial auto-correlation in the modelling, and that we then can estimate our models using ordinary OLS. Our results indicate that the intra-municipal and intra-regional knowledge accessibilities are both significant and capable of explaining a significant share of the variation in growth of value added per employee between Swedish municipalities. However, inter-regional knowledge accessibility turned out to be insignificant, indicating that knowledge flows are bounded in space.

Keywords: knowledge; endogenous growth; region; accessibility; Sweden (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 O30 O52 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo
Date: 2005-10-18
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Published in Industry and Innovation, 2007, pages 129-149.

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Working Paper: Knowledge Accessibility and Regional Economic Growth (2006)
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