The purpose of this research study is to examine the relationship between international trade and economic growth and the effect that international trade has on economic growth in sub-Saharan African countries (Sub-Saharan Africa). The majority of previous studies and research in this area claim that there is a positive correlation between these two variables, yet there are still some who question how much these two variables actually have influenced each other and if that effect is really significant enough to be considered significant as well as important. The information and data used in this study are taken from the World Bank Group, Human Development Reports and Fraser Institute. The study's theoretical framework uses growth theories, which consisted of the Solow model and endogenous growth theory, and trade theories, which consisted of the Ricardian model, the Heckscher-Ohlin model, and institutional theory to better explain the concept of economic growth and how international trade can affect the process of achieving economic growth. Within this research, a panel dataset study was carried out with the support of a regression analysis in order to measure the correlation between international trade and economic growth. The dependent variable for this research study was economic growth in the form of annual GDP per capita growth, while the independent variables included international trade, education, capital, population growth, labor force, corruption and economic freedom. Additionally, the study includes thirty-six out of a total of forty-eight possible countries in sub-Saharan Africa and is limited to a ten-year period between 2009-2019. The final result of this study's research shows that there is a significant positive correlation between economic growth and international trade and concludes that international trade actually has a very important effect/impact and is essential to achieving economic growth.
This article discusses the re-emergence and modernisation of traditional goat cheese production in Sweden, in particular in the northern county of Jämtland. The data have been gathered through fieldwork and interviews with goat farmers, authorities and others involved in the production of goat cheese. As early as the 1970s, a number of initiatives were taken to formalise the productive activities of this sector and to improve product quality. The most important project was the launch of the cooperative Jämtspira at the beginning of the 1980s. In contrast to other Swedish cooperatives, this organisation involved its members in developing a common trademark and a standardised product range, undertaking joint marketing efforts, and finding creative solutions to infrastructure problems. Jämtland was strengthened and modernised, largely owing to the active part played by regional authorities in this process. The national artisan centre Eldrimner, which became a hub for small-scale food production, is another important institution that has strengthened local knowledge and taught cheesemaking skills to new goat farmers from all over Sweden. Although many obstacles have been removed and the sector has found successful solutions to strategic issues relating to product development and marketing, there are still significant structural shortcomings that could reduce profitability and endanger the future development of the sector.
Research on gender and entrepreneurship, is a broad field of research developed in the intersection between theories about entrepreneurship and gender and feminist theory. Within this research field labor, family and the state are the key elements. The gender perspective is one of society's most important organizing principles and entrepreneurship is seen as important for promoting growth, creating jobs, etc. The study of gender and entrepreneurship in combination is therefore important to understand the forces that shape our history, our present and our future.
This book is the result of a workshop organized by the Research Center Enter Forum, at Södertörn University in December 2015. The theme of the workshop was Policy, Entrepreneurship and Gender. Starting from a gender perspective, the papers presented analyzed how economic development and social processes has led to the emergence of new industries, and how technology and policy in cooperation may outcrowd women’s participation in certain industries. Additional topics are the impact of gender on firms ability to survive in the long term; How women entrepreneurs see women in business; How social entrepreneurship can be the catalyst for women's rights; And the the challenges and opportunities of female equine entrepreneurs in urban businesses encounter in their daily activities
In 1771, the first Swedish academic thesis on bankruptcy and insolvency was defended by Carl Bergström at Uppsala University. In this and other contemporary Swedish publications on the topic, shortcomings in the debtor’s character including gambling, dishonesty, fraudulent behaviour and a disposition for speculation were mentioned as major causes for bankruptcies. The idea that a debtor also was a swindler, and should be severely punished, was spread by Italian merchants to, above all, France, Spain, England and Germany. The moralising causal explanation for bankruptcy can be questioned from a social science research perspective. Based on modern literature, we can see many reasons for why a trader, shopkeeper or an artisan had to file for bankruptcy. An economic shock is an event that occurs outside of an economy and produces significant change within an economy.
Ekonomer betraktar vanligtvis konkursutvecklingen som en konjunkturindikator och därmed beroende av förändringar på ekonomins efterfrågesida: konkurserna förväntas öka i tider av ekonomisk nedgång och minska under högkonjunkturer. Flertalet analyser är emellertid kortsiktiga. I denna uppsats presenterar vi ny och unik empiri där vi analyserar det långsiktiga sambandet mellan konjunkturväxlingar och konkurser i Sverige mellan år 1830 och år 2010. I uppsatsen diskuteras också problem som kan uppstå i tolkningen av konkursstatistiken, både historiskt och i vår samtid. Den statistiska analysen visar att det delvis går att fastställa ett samband mellan makroekonomiska svängningar och förändringar i konkursmängden.
Recent developments in entrepreneurship suggest a causal link between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth: entrepreneurship precedes economic growth. A positive effect from entrepreneurship on economic development in advanced, innovation-driven economies in the most recent decades is often maintained. Self-employment is one of the most common indicators of entrepreneurship. The present study uses very long series of non-interrupted data on self-employment in Sweden (1850–2000). It analyzes the relationship between variations in self-employment and economic growth. For the entire period, variations in self-employment had a significant, instantaneous positive correlation with GDP growth. However, no causal relationship could be discovered: variations in self-employment did not (Granger) cause GDP growth. We discovered a structural break in GDP growth as early as in the year of 1948. Up until 1948, (Granger) causality between self-employment and GDP could not be established for any direction. For the other segment (1949–2000), GDP growth (Granger) caused self-employment growth, but not the other way around. For the period 1949–2000, but not for the previous period, selfemployment lagged with respect to GDP growth. Consequently, GDP growth preceded self-employment growth, but self-employment growth did not precede GDP growth. Given that self-employment is a suitable indicator, the empirical results in this study are, in several respects, in disagreement with dominating assumptions in mainstream research.
This chapter studies the internationalization of the Swedish–Danish dairy corporation Arla. During a period of 100 years the dairy sector went from being at the focus of national and regional interest, the industry has become global. In some geographical markets, or in particular market areas, these transnationals – corporations as well as cooperatives – may compete fiercely, and their growth strategy is often to merge with or acquire local producers. However, these multinational firms also actively cooperate in other areas (e.g. in branding or distribution) or on other geographical markets. This may take the form of strategic alliances, such as joint ventures. Thus, coopetition – cooperation and competition – has been a common recent strategy. In the case at focus in this study, Arla Foods a.m.b.a. mergers are conducted with cooperatives in European countries, while businesses that are located further away are taken care of through exports and joint ventures. The main contribution of this article is that it employs internationalization theory and places the globalization of cooperatives in the middle of the academic discussion about internationalization. A recommendation for further studies is to both dig deeper into the changing nature of cooperatives historically, but also to look closer at the strategic deals that global expansion of cooperatives is based on.
This book explores Eastern European consumer cultures in the twentieth century, taking a comparative perspective and conceptualizing the peculiarities of consumption in the region. Contributions cover lifestyles and marketing strategies in imperial contexts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; urban consumer cultures in the Interwar Period; and consumer and advertising cultures in the Soviet Union and its satellite republics. It traces the development of marketing throughout the century, and the changes in society brought about by democratization and the 'Americanization' of consumption. Taken together, the essays gathered here make a valuable contribution to our understanding of consumption and advertising in the region.
Other land property forms than the private are often conceived as residues of the past, residues that paradoxically seem never to pass away. An example is the form of semi-communal land ownership of the agricultural communities of Chile’s Region IV. Using sociological and historical research methods, this study explores the origin and the emergence of this agrarian form during the last four centuries, through the community Canela Baja and the neighbouring latifundium El Totoral, as a contrasting case.
Having on one hand, the form of communal land as the common denominator, we have on the other the social aspects resulting from particular histories of the form. Therefore, a distinction between imposed and spontaneous forms is introduced. Confronting the case study with research results from other socio-political and material conditions, the study suggest that while some of the present communal ownership forms are the outcome of political decisions, others are of long historical processes. The imposed forms are not so much communities; rather reserves or homelands.
Differentiating it from both private property and the so called “tragedy of the commons“, communal land ownership is conceived as an institution of its own which in Chile shares the same historical origin in colonial land grants as private property. Since they have kept their territorial integrity permanently in an undivided form, the study suggest that these agrarian collectives have historically avoided their conversion into minifundium, being thus a resource management solution, which acted as a brake to land fragmentation. Thus, the communal form represents not only another historical pattern of development, but also another way of organising ownership and production than both the latifundium and minifundium.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Swedish credit market was still dominated by private financial networks and by a private supply of capital. Banks, discounts and other public financial institutions only played minor roles as financers of trade and industry. In spite of these circumstances private financial networks were embedded in public financial institutions and bankruptcy legislation. In this chapter, the authors describe the development of the bankruptcy system in Sweden between 1734 and 1849, placed in a European perspective. The Roman bankruptcy legislation ceased to function in conjunction with the disintegration of the Empire and its institutions. For a long time thereafter, a long-standing bankruptcy system was missing in Europe. The Germanic tribes brought their own right-system into the Roman territories of Gaul, Italy and Spain, where they often lived alongside the older, Romanized population and its laws.
Företag är självklara inslag i det moderna ekonomiska livet. Människor har i århundraden startat och drivit företag, de har köpt varor och tjänster av företag och säkert i många omständigheter även sålt, varor eller tjänster till företag, eller den egna arbetskraften mot en löneersättning. Företag spelar en mycket viktig roll i samhällsekonomin. Genom att producera varor och tjänster koordinerar företag användningen av resurser i form av råvaror, arbetskraft, teknologi och kapital. Utan företag skulle var och en av oss behöva lägga oändligt mycket tid på att få tag på sådant som vi behöver för att tillgodose våra grundläggande behov. Att behöva producera allt vi behöver skulle också vara tidsödande, dyrt och leda till stora välfärdsförluster både för samhället och för enskilda individer. En effekt av att företag organiserar produktionen av varor och tjänster är att de specialiserar sig på en eller ett fåtal varor och tjänster. Detta gör att de genom sina erfarenheter och interna kunskapsutveckling kan effektivisera produktionen så att vi kan nyttja de resurser som varje företag tar i anspråk på ett så effektivt sätt som möjligt. Företag är dock inte en enhetlig massa. Det finns små, medelstora och riktigt stora företag. Företag kan vara privat eller statligt ägda och några verkar väldigt lokalt, medan andra verkar i många olika länder samtidigt. På grund av sin speciella ställning i samhällsekonomin har företaget och företagandet haft en självklar roll som studieobjekt inom ekonomisk historia. Detta kapitel ger en översikt över de viktigaste forskningsfrågorna och teman inom ekonomisk historisk forskning.
The growth of R&D in East Asia has triggered the notion of a new innovation geography, where R&D is no longer a privilege of the traditional OECD countries. What does this mean for mid-sized emerging economies, without the scale advantages and bargaining power of India or China? This paper uses Turkey as a case to examine the continual unevenness of international R&D investments. By analyzing opportunities and limitations for local initiatives in the telecommunications, pharmaceutical, and automotive industries the paper finds that active private capital, a sufficient scale of production, and focused public policies are needed to attract international R&D.
What has happened to the economic history in and about the three Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after independence in 1991? The survey includes problem areas researched, the reinterpretations of history in different periods, in particular the interwar years and the period of Soviet rule after the Second World War, and the institutional changes in the academy. Even if economic history has not been the first priority of universities, considerable work has been done on development models and the different successes and failures recorded. The frequent institutional changes of the economies, from liberal to state capitalism, to command economy and back to liberal models, have made the task of economic historians difficult. Much time has been spent assessing data and making them comparable, and even more on looking for reliable statistics in the Soviet system. Despite many challenges, much has also been achieved.
Financial crises occur at regular and unpredictable moments in capitalist economies. However, an absence of shared theoretical approaches to and even definitions of the subject still plague the analysis of financial crises. This situation makes historical analysis even more important. This article compares two Swedish financial crises, one in the 1920s and the other in the 1930s. The comparison shows that despite their temporal and spatial proximity, the crises seemed to have had quite different underlying causes, links to international circumstances, severity, and government responses. The 1920s crisis in Sweden was for instance much deeper than the crisis in the 1930s, a marked contrast to the experience of most countries during these two periods. In focusing on the driving forces behind the crises, their development and governmental policies, the article also provides an opportunity to reflect on both financial crisis theories, on the current crisis and on recent historical research concerning crises.
In this special section, the histories of dietary reform have been approached and explored from different perspectives. The essays weave together threads of the history of dietary advice and nutritional standards with social history, women’s history and food history, covering the elements of life reform and women’s movements, the establishment of communist food ideology, the development of modern food safety and food security, etc. Three peer-reviewed articles focusing on the case studies of Estonia, Bulgaria and the Russian empire are built on previously untapped sources and offer original perspectives on the topic. As the contributions suggest, the entangled histories of dietary reform efforts proved to be a valuable and novel prism through which to study the region and the history of Europe in general.