Hans Westlund

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Verified

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• Professor
• Professor (Full) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

The scientific objective of this study is to analyse and compare the convergence, divergence, or stagnation of selected regional labour markets indicators in the European Union, employing beta and sigma convergence concepts and the convergence club approach. By analysing seven labour market indicators from the Regional Competitiveness Index, we unc...

Based on the concept of teleworkability, its sluggish determinants of industry structure and workplace culture, and the change in people’s valuation of rural amenities that happened during the pandemic, this paper analyzes their possible influence on counterurbanization during the pandemic in Sweden and Slovenia. We found signs of open (migration)...

Internet access in China has sharply increased, but the potential effect of internet access on rural households' income and inequality in developing countries could be more complex. To fill in this gap, this study uses data from the China Family Panel Survey in 2014, 2016 and 2018 to examine the impact of internet access on rural households' income...

Based on a historical overview of spatial networks and mobility, and the development of spatial theory, this review discusses current rural problems in Europe and the need for a new rural policy. The development toward a post-urban world, that is, a world where the traditional urban–rural dichotomy is dissolving and is replaced by city-regions and...

This paper documents regional population changes in Sweden since 1860 and investigates how these changes link to regional economic development (regional GDP). We combine long‐term decade population data for the historical counties (1860‐2020) with detailed annual population observations for municipalities (1968‐2021). As industrialization picked up...

En detaljerad beskrivning av metodiken i SCB:s nya multiregionala input-output tabeller samt förslag på utvecklingssatser för att säkerställa tabellernas produktion, kvalitet och tillämpning.

This paper aims to study the determinants of subjective happiness among working females with a focus on female managers. Drawn on a large social survey data set (N = 10470) in China, this paper constructs gender development index at sub-national levels to study how institutional settings are related to female managers’ happiness. We find that femal...

This research aimed to study queen bee syndrome in China. Results from a nationwide survey (Chinese General Social Survey) revealed that female managers are less likely to defend the existing gender hierarchy. We also found that female managers are analogous to men in many other aspects, such as hobbies and values. Female managers adopt a mixed str...

In this study, we use unique purpose-built survey data to show that small food firms are more innovative when externally engaged. To capture this, we apply a broad classification of innovative activities, including new products, processes, markets, organization, and distribution channels, and examine them against types of external interactions. The...

The expansion of wind turbines plays a significant role in developing the ability of a country like Sweden to achieve climate-neutral energy production without relying on nuclear power plants. Wind-turbine energy production is expected to grow in the coming decades. Conflicts may arise between, on the one hand, the government and the energy authori...

Building on the neo-endogenous rural development model and the resource-based view of the firm, this paper investigates the role of place-based amenities for new firm formation. Empirically, we employ a full-population dataset encompassing new firms in Sweden from 2009 to 2016, combined with geocoded datasets with the spatial distribution of nature...

This article examines the value and effect of social capital deriving from cross-ethnic business cooperation on social networks and society in the aftermath of war. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the social function entrepreneurship conveys beyond its economic role. Based on Putnam’s bridging and bonding social capital theory an...

The objective of this book has been to examine the possibilities of implementing smart development policies in rural areas. Our results show that the smart development policies implemented by the EU are not well-suited to all types of geographic areas. They are effective in urban regions or in intermediary territories-that is to say, those that com...

The purpose of this book, produced in the framework of the TASTE project , is to provide clear answers to two major questions: a) Is there a possible smart development policy for European rural areas? b) Which type of smart development solution (agriculture, business/industry, peri-urbanization, tourism/leisure …) should be selected in view of regi...

Today, the question of rural-urban peripheries and their place in development processes is being raised all over the world. Once overlooked as areas of secondary significance and places that don’t matter in comparison with cities - with their smart development peripheral areas and regions are now emerging and are having their revenge by causing a s...

With the economic transition and changes in the urban–rural relationships, rural revitalization has become a great political concern in China. Reforming the rural land system is considered an important prerequisite for the revitalization of the countryside as the homestead transfer can provide new land utilization space for industries. This case st...

Small- and medium-sized towns (SMSTs) not integrated into expanding metropolitan regions often face industrial decline and depopulation. As a result, many of them lack resilience to change and may be classified as vulnerable. While research holds that a local government’s efforts to act in an entrepreneurial way are important for the development of...

In this chapter, Hans Westlund evaluates Gunnar Myrdal’s contributions to the analysis of regions’ economic development. Myrdal recognized that economic problems could not be treated in isolation from society as a whole. Myrdal’s most important work for regional science was Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (1957). In contrast to stable eq...

Do local development policies influence local employment growth? Based on a survey to municipal managers in all Swedish municipalities, this is one of the first studies to empirically assess the relationship between reported local development initiatives (entrepreneurial governance (EG)) and growth of local employment. We find a weak but significan...

This study investigates the relationship between social capital and small business entrepreneurship in China. Unlike previous studies that focus solely on rural or urban residents, this paper pays more attention to the differences between them. According to our study, social capital has both positive and negative impacts on small business entrepren...

The purpose of this paper is to address the hypotheses of complete urbanization and the post urban world with an emphasis on the agricultural sector. The paper studies spatial and temporal changes in land-use and agricultural activities in one rapidly growing metropolitan region, the Stockholm region. We explore the number and size of agricultural...

This entry provides a broad overview of contemporaneous issues in modern cities and city systems, seen from an economic perspective. In our “urban century,” cities tend to become engines of economic, social, and political influence which may even have global footprints. On the basis of an extensive literature review, the strategic role of cities in...

Objectives In recent years, the origins and sources of social networks and social capital have been extensively studied. Previous studies have primarily focused on social demographic factors. To enrich our understanding of the determinants of social networks, this article explores the role of mobility in rural China. Methods Drawing upon a data se...

Rural decline is an inevitable process as human society transforms from the agrarian to the urban-industrial economy, and further on to the knowledge economy. Through an extensive literature review, this paper aims to interpret why some rural areas decline while some others do not. The findings show that it is by the interactions between rural area...

The gap between policy, implementation, and outcome is neither new nor specific to the sphere of sanitation. This article explores the gap between sanitation policy intentions and outcomes in a comparative study in Rwanda and Uganda with ‘good’ and ‘limited or no’ reported progress respectively towards the former Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)...

Europe is in a phase of vast transition regarded both from a demographic and economic-structural point of view. Studies have shown that demographic development differs a lot when comparing urban regions with more sparsely populated peripheral regions. These diverging patterns are shown to be especially strong in the northern and eastern parts of Eu...

Having gone from 11.8% of its population inhabiting urban areas in 1950 to 49.2% by 2010, China represents the most dramatic urban transformation the world has seen. With the contemporary urban narrative presenting new challenges, particularly in terms of its unprecedented pace and scale, this paper conducts an inquiry into the nature and causes of...

Denna studie handlar om framtiden för Borås. Den gör det för att dess tema gäller högskolans roll som en central komponent i en kunskapsproducerande ekonomi med global räckvidd. I studien analyseras hur kunskap sprids från utbildnings- och forskningsverksamheten vid Högskolan i Borås till det omgivande samhället samt betydelsen av olika kunskapsspr...

The impact of social capital on economic development has been broadly studied by scholars. However, research in the Chinese context is relatively rare. Drawing upon data from the China General Social Survey, our results suggest that the enhancing effect of social capital on total factor productivity is very limited in the case of China. The network...

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In the networked information and knowledge-based economy and society, the notions of ‘open’ and ‘openness’ are used in a variety of contexts; open source, open access, open economy, open government, open innovation – just to name a few. This paper aims at discussing openness and developing a taxonomy that may be used to analyse the concept of openn...

This research explores the use of psychometric techniques to improve understanding of psychological mechanisms underlying judgment of excreta as fertilizer in agriculture including other excreta related activities. Participants consisted of environmental health students, smallholder farmers and traders in rural and urban Rwanda and Uganda. The find...

In 2010, the European Union adopted the notion ‘smart’ in its new ten-year growth strategy Europe 2020 stating that Europe should become a smart, sustainable, and inclusive economy. The broad and policy-oriented concepts of smart growth and smart development are part of the strategy introduced as a response to the observed low growth rates of innov...

This article aims to investigate the evidence of spatio-temporal disparity in rural household income at the provincial level in China during the 1978–2007 period. A research framework is developed to study the transitional processes of decentralisation, marketisation, urbanisation and globalisation. By computing the Moran’s I index and using the sp...

Across most of Europe, the countryside seems to show a polarized development in which large districts are depopulating, while certain areas, mainly around big- and mid-sized cities, are increasing in population. The latter development is often described in concepts of “rural gentrification” and “rurbanization”, symbolizing a transformation of rural...

This contribution argues that the great many spatial challenges of our world and the emerging spatial dynamics call for new modes of thinking on regional science research. The creation of a Regional Science Academy may be helpful in meeting this novel demand. The much needed radical and new perspective on the future of our space economy is illustra...

This paper discusses the challenges that 'the triumph of the city' entails for urban policy, planning and research. The paper contains a brief overview of factors behind the triumph of the city, for instance, whether it can be argued that we are entering a post-urban world; the challenges that metropolitan regions' and megacities' internal relation...

This paper examines the roles of physical capital, human capital, and social capital in China's economic growth during the reform period 1981–2010. Empirical estimation confirms that physical capital and human capital contribute to the economic growth, probably due to the capital accumulation and the improvement of labor productivity. The impact of...

This chapter provides a theoretically informed discussion of creativity in social capital and elaborates on its role in economic growth and development based on recent theoretical developments in evolutionary economics and economic geography. We discuss social capital as an explanatory factor for creativity and creative processes in the short run,...

Westlund H., Larsson J. P. and Olsson A. R. Start-ups and local entrepreneurial social capital in the municipalities of Sweden, Regional Studies. This paper contains one of the first empirical attempts to investigate the influence of local entrepreneurial social capital (ESC) on start-up propensity. A unique database, including not only total start...

Against the background of global urban knowledge economy, this paper discusses some of the challenges that sustainable urban life is facing in the global knowledge economy of the 21st century. The paper makes an overview of the fundamental change in urban-rural relations, urban and rural demographics, the concepts of place surplus and place attract...

In the current knowledge economy, the most important production factor, human knowledge, is much more mobile than the dominating production factors of previous periods. This means that theories of spatial development, formulated during the manufacturing-industrial era, might not be wholly applicable today. One of the basic assumptions of spatial th...

This paper investigates the relationship between overall inequality in China and the contributions of physical capital, human capital and social capital. The investment in physical capital tends to enlarge overall inequality while human capital helps to reduce the inequality. Human capital appears to be more influential than physical capital in ove...

Social capital is often considered a key factor for local development. This book analyzes the role of social capital for rural areas’ survival and development in the current age of metropolitan growth – an era in which urban is the norm and where rural areas must adapt to this new situation and build innovative urban-rural relations.

This study investigates factors determining the location of foreign direct investments (FDI) in Sweden. The main purpose is to examine the link between FDI and public incentives, in the form of regional grants, which make up a central part of the Swedish regional policy and state expenditures that explicitly addresses regional development. Our main...

As in other countries, urbanization and industrialization in S weden was two sides of the same coin. To a large extent, the S wedish urbanization took place at a low level with the emergence of many small towns. In the last decades, a redistribution of the urban population to bigger cities has happened. This neo‐urbanization is interpreted as a con...

Policies aiming at promoting entrepreneurship are in general formed on national levels, without any consideration of differences between urban and rural areas. Usually, cities are provided with better and more modern infrastructure; cities have better supply of physical, financial and human capital, and connected services, and cities have a more mo...

In the last nineteen years we have witnessed an explosion of research on social capital in almost all the social sciences. The question addressed by this paper is the following one: what has been achieved during these years? The first part of the discussion is devoted to a review of the most influential definitions of social capital. The second poi...

By entrepreneurial combinations of voluntary resources, project means from public and private sources, commissions on contracts and other ways of financing, the youth house Fryshuset, with a great number of social activities for primarily young people in Stockholm, Sweden, has been able to allocate resources for establishing and expanding its activ...

Policies aiming at promoting entrepreneurship are in general formed on national levels, without any consideration to differences between urban and rural areas. Usually cities are provided with better and more modern infrastructure; cities have better supply of physical, financial and human capital and connected services, and cities have a more mode...

The current empirical entrepreneurship literature mainly shows a positive correlation between entrepreneurship (measured as the number of startups) and economic growth. However, the mechanisms by which entrepreneurship exerts its positive influence are not obvious. The net result of startups on employment or GDP can be negative, at least in the sho...

This paper aims at analyzing the obstacles to in-depth cooperation between Swedish universities and other parts of society. Social capital is used as a comprehensive concept for the norms, values and relations that exist in the university sector and between this sector and the surrounding society. A working hypothesis is that universities’ social...

The regional policy in Sweden is usually divided in two parts. The specific regional policy comprises the responsible national ministry’s means for regional development whereas the broad regional policy includes other policy areas with an important geographical dimension, e.g. education, infrastructure and subsidies to local and regional public sec...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make a general comparison between urban‐rural relationship in China and that in the developed countries, aiming to draw some experiences based on which future tendencies of urban‐rural relationship in China could be predicted. Design/methodology/approach – The core analysis of this paper examines how the u...

Do the social and cultural environments have any impact on regional development, expressed in terms of e.g. entrepreneurship, innovations and growth of new industries? In the current literature, two partly contradicting hypotheses can be discerned: 1. Florida's hypothesis, saying that a heterogeneous civil society with diverse values combined with...

Social capital pertains to the social relations between humans, and since these social relations have a spatial dimension, so too does social capital. However, the spatial dimension of social capital has received little attention in the literature so far. Even in a glo-balizing world where electronic and virtual communication have the potential to...

In this special issue, we attempted to combine two multifaceted concepts, social capital and space, a difficult and complex task. The various papers in this special issue have all demonstrated that social capital has a spatial dimension but they have also demonstrated that a straightforward connection between the two concepts does not emerge. In ou...

This paper summarizes 15 years of empirical research at various spatial levels on social capital and economic performance. On the firm level, results are unambiguous: there is strong evidence of the impact of social capital on firms' performance. However, the results become less clear for spatial units with a large number of anonymous actors. The c...