What Can the State Do for You?

It has been suggested that Swedish policy during the early post-war period was strongly directed towards mobility-increasing expenditures – most notably relocation allowances – aimed at moving labour from north to south. While this view has dominated the academic discussion on labour market policy, there is little direct evidence. We make three claims. First, the relocation allowances have to be evaluated against the regional policy. Second, by doing so we show that the mobility-oriented policy was predominant only for a short period of time: in the early 1970s, there was a decisive shift towards a policy directed at stimulating employment in the north. Third, drawing on this, we revaluate the previous view on policy making in Sweden. Our analysis suggests that the Social Democratic government acted in a voter-maximizing way. The relocation allowances were introduced at the behest of the Trade Union Confederation (LO). The regional subsidies were expanded when voter sentiment turned against the perceived depletion of rural regions. However, this strategy interacted with the political and institutional environment. The new election law in 1970 and political competition from the Centre Party pushed the Social Democrats to shift their policies on regional subsidies.     

What drives export performance of firms in Eastern and Western Poland?

We use a unique firm-level survey dataset that draws from the EFIGE (European Firms in a Global Economy) questionnaire to unveil differences in factors driving export performance in the most structurally diverse areas of Poland. While conventional results regarding the role of size, foreign ownership and innovation activity are confirmed at the aggregate level, the picture breaks down when Western and Eastern macroregions are extracted. Our results suggest that the common perception of a more developed West (Poland ‘A’) and a backward East (Poland ‘B’) might be outdated. Rather, firms in both regions seem to follow distinct strategies for and have dissimilar success factors in competing internationally. Interestingly, export performance in the East is found to benefit from family ties in business, but also from product innovation and non-price competitiveness. In the West, it is associated mostly with size and foreign ownership. Overall, our results, on the one hand, add support to the ‘new’ new trade theory and the ‘new’ new economic geography’s premises related to the importance of microeconomic factors and, on the other, contribute to the discussion on the pattern of regional development in Poland. We also discuss some implications for policymakers and managers and suggest directions for further research.     

Paving the way for new regional industrial paths: actors and modes of change in Scania’s games industry

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarly work has enhanced our understanding of how new path development activities are enabled or constrained by ‘regional environments’, made up of pre-existing industrial structures, knowledge organizations, support structures and institutional configurations. This paper moves beyond overly static views on regional environments. We develop a dynamic perspective by analysing conceptually and empirically how a constraining environment can be transformed into one that enables the development of new growth paths. The paper offers a typology of various modes of change, including layering, adaptation and novel application that are used by key actors to ‘manipulate’ the regional support structures to facilitate new regional industrial path development. The conceptual framework is applied to a case study of the digital games industry in the region of Scania, southern Sweden. Our findings suggest that the creation of a more enabling environment for the growth of the digital games industry has been the outcome of multi-scalar processes and combinations of various modes of change employed by a few key individuals operating in the newly emerging path.     

How proactive? How pacifist? Charting Japan’s evolving defence posture

After 60 years maintaining Self-Defense Forces rather than a normal military, Japan is moving towards exercising collective self-defence, long restricted by interpretations of its 1945 Peace Constitution. The merits of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's ‘proactive pacifism’ are intensely debated by those welcoming greater international contributions from Japan and others suspicious of Japanese ‘remilitarisation’. A nation’s defence posture can theoretically be hijacked by aggressive nationalists, shift to pacifist isolationism, or rely on non-military internationalism or multilateral security cooperation. This article assesses competing explanations about the post-war trajectory of Japan’s defence posture by charting variation in military doctrine and capabilities. The analysis finds that Tokyo has made incremental policy adjustments under domestic and international constraints, and is not aggressively remilitarising.