Lena Andersson-Skog

National patterns and the regulation of railways and telephony in the Nordic Countries up to 1950

Abstract It has been suggested that the railways, as the first national industrialisation project, became role models for public regulatory solutions in other industries in the same country. However, it still has to be explored if the institutional arrangements have actually been transferred from the railways to other industries. Comparative country analysis may increase our understanding of how institutions changes and eventually are ‘inherited’ by other industries. In this paper the question of whether or not the bias of the railway policy in the various Nordic countries found its way into a later emerging network industry, the telephone industry is discussed. The result shows that even as similar railway regulations emerged in the Nordic countries from the 1920s, the regulation of the telephone industries did not emerge along the same lines. Here, two different regulatory trajectories were established, one in Sweden and Norway and another one in Denmark and Finland. Here other factors such as for instance political bargaining power and national and regional development strategies must be taken into consideration.

From state railway housekeeping to railway economics: Swedish railway policy and economic transformation after 1920 in an institutional perspective

In this article the development of Swedish railway policy in the twentieth century is interpreted as a process of institutional change where the effects of real economic development are filtered through the railways established institutional framework. The change in railway policy is seen as a result of an economic historical process where the industrialisation eras conception of the role of railways in society survives in institutional arrangements, and marks the railways adjustment to present-day economic and soical conditons.

In the Shadow of the Swedish Welfare State: Women and the Service Sector

The twentieth-century history of the Swedish welfare state and public-service sector is critical to understanding the changing role of women in Sweden, as the expansion of the countrys service production, beginning in the 1960s, has been mainly the result of wel-fare-state policies. Yet womens self-employment and wage work in the service industry has been neglected as an economic factor in both traditional economic and business history accounts and in historical studies of gender. Some suggestions are made for future explorations of the Swedish service sector as it operates in the shadow of the welfare state.

Institutions in the transport and communications industries : State and private actors in the making of institutional patterns, 1850-1990

Institutions in the transport and communications industries : State and private actors in the making of institutional patterns, 1850-1990

What Can the State Do for You?: Relocation allowances and regional subsidies in post-war Sweden

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.