Competition, Restrictive Agreements and Public Regulation in the Swedish Domestic-Market Industries, 1890-1940
Project leader: Dr. Bengt Åke Berg
Private restrictive agreements, such as cartels, and government measures, for example tariffs and various types of regulation, played an important role in some branches of industry (e.g. food and construction materials), but had less impact on others (e.g. textiles and apparel). Developments in a number of different markets are studied and compared in order to identify general patterns. Particular attention is paid to the intertwined relations among private agreements and public regulations and the emergence of cooperative manufacturing activities.
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Grain Price Volatility, 1775-1800
Project leader: Dr. Bengt Åke Berg
Swedish grain prices were significantly more stable in the fourth quarter of the 18th century than they had been earlier or were to become later, as well as in comparison to other countries. During that same period, grain production began to increase at a significantly higher rate then before. Moreover, the period also witnessed a number of public policy changes, initiated by Count Liljencrants, and that led to liberalized grain markets, import tariffs that were adjusted d in response to market prices and substantial government grain purchases. To what extent can these new policies explain the observed market developments?
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Locally Governed Public Grain Storage Programs – An International Comparison.
Project leader: Dr. Bengt Åke Berg
In a number of countries, including Spain, Italy, Russia, China, Norway, Sweden and Finland, during the 17th to the 19th centuries there existed locally administrated grain banks. These provided grain loans in kind to the rural population and often devoted their profits to various communal purposes. What similarities did these activities in various countries display and in what respect did they differ? To what extent can the various patterns observed be explained by differing economic, social or cultural environments?
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The Wholesaler’s society in Stockholm (Grosshandlarsocieteten i Stockholm).
Project leaders are professor Klas Nyberg and professor emeritus Håkan Lindgren.
The project is about the wholesalers and their significance for modernization of the Swedish economy. It also deals with the wholesalers’ society in the 20th century for developing alternatives to public health care.
Two volumes are planned. The first volume covers the period before the mid 19th century. Previous research shows that from the 1740’s and onwards, the wholesalers society in Stockholm developed cooperative solutions which supported the the private markets for goods and credit. These were arrangements somewhere between the public and private, and they preceded the development of specialized markets in the late 19th century. The society also played an important part in institutional change, for example in currency reforms.
The second volume one is about the development after 1850. The book takes its departure from the traditional role of the wholeasalers society as a privileged merchant guild. The wholesalers dominated the political life of Stockholm until the mid 1860’s. They continued to have considerable influence over economical policy even long after this. For example, they helped to develop Stockholm as a maritime city. As the political influence of the wholesaler’ society was reduced, it continued to have a social function, such as giving financial support to members in need. There was also social work within elder care and education, which has developed into important complements to public welfare.
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The Pensionsgaranti Corporation (FPG) and its Role in the History of the Swedish Private Sector
Project leader: Professor Mats Larsson
In 1961, the mutual insurance company Pensionsgaranti was jointly established by the Swedish Employers Association and the unions representing management and supervisory employees. Right from the start, the intent was to guarantee those employees a supplementary pension (ITP), over and above what was provided by the General Supplementary Pension System (ATP). The ITP system replaced the various service pension plans that had previously existed in numerous private firms.
This project intends to analyze the development of the Pensionsgaranti Corporation during its first 50 years of existence. It will deal with the strategic considerations that controlled its business activity, as well as its position within the national economy. Special emphasis will be placed on the Corporation’s role in meeting the pension obligations of the private business sector. In this analysis, its relationship with its customer firms will play a decisive role.
The establishment and activities of the Pensionsgaranti Corporation will also be analyzed in a wider social context. The Corporation’s activities are especially interesting when seen in the context of the post-World War II transformation of the Swedish insurance system. The political situation, as well as macro economic changes, thus has also been of great importance for the development of the Pensionsgaranti Corporation.
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Wealth and Debt Accumulation in 19th Century Transitional Sweden
Project leader: Professor Håkan Lindgren
This project addresses the following research problems in the period 1840-1910: 1) the transformation of the credit market from a predominately informal, or unintermediated, one to an organized credit market consisted of mortgage, commercial and savings banks; 2) the life cycle pattern of asset and debt accumulation; and 3) the distribution of wealth and debts among social classes and between men and women.
It is based on the exploitation of a rich source material which has hardly been used in financial history research, the probate estate records. Several recent pilot studies show that the built-in biases in probate records when using them to picture various characteristics of the living population can be dealt with by using inverted mortality rates in different age groups, thereby diminishing the influence of over-representation of old people and under-representation of young people. The idea is to treat the decedents with probated estates as a sample of the entire living population, adjusted to the variations of death rates among different age groups.
The idea is to expand the breadth of local case studies to regional levels, focusing on economic-geographical regions around major cities and towns. There are two steps in the expansion: first the rural districts influenced by the City of Kalmar will be investigated, and secondly a region in central Sweden will be included.
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Growth, Tradition and Renewal: The Economic History of Stockholm, 1945-2005
Project leader: Associate Professor Tom Petersson
From an economic perspective, today’s Stockholm is by far Sweden’s most important metropolitan area. Those economic activities that are considered to be of special importance for the country’s future international competitiveness, such as information technology, pharmacology, bio-technology and finance, are to a large extent concentrated in Stockholm. In a time of accelerating globalization, when capital, manufactured goods and, to some degree, people are increasingly free to move across national boundaries, Stockholm’s role as the center of the Swedish economy has become increasingly evident.
The development of Stockholm since World War II is a clear indication of the transformation of Sweden from an industrial to a service and information society. In fact, already during the inter-war period, Stockholm was replaced by Gothenburg as the country’s most important industrial center. Shortly thereafter, Malmo also passed Stockholm in terms of industrial activity. Instead the Capital experienced an increasing concentration of corporate headquarters, new service firms and, not least, government administration. Together with the traditional manufacturing activities that were able to recreate themselves, such as telecommunications and pharmacology, Stockholm has experienced something of an economic metamorphosis during recent decades. In other words, it can be said that Stockholm has led the way in the third industrial revolution of the Swedish economy.
Remarkably enough, there exists no overall survey of Stockholm’s industrial and economic transformation during the post war period – in other words, no Economic History of Stockholm. Many other cities, including the country’s second and third largest, Gothenburg and Malmö, and even a number of medium sized ones, such as Uppsala, Norrköping and Västerås, have been the subject of comprehensive economic-historical studies. Thus, the absence of any historical study of Stockholm is all the more striking.
The intent of the project, “Growth, Tradition and Renewal: The Economic History of Stockholm, 1945-2005” is to describe and explain, from an historical and comparative perspective, how the Stockholm region has handled the change from an industrial to a service and information based economy. The goal is to produce an integrated series of monographs that will provide a comprehensive picture of Stockholm’s economic development during the post-war period. The planned component studies will, among other topics, deal with the financial markets, the media and news market, the information technology and life sciences industries, the private construction industry and the tourism and entertainment industries, as well as the political economy of Stockholm.
The project will be carried out in cooperation with the Uppsala Center for Business History at Uppsala University, Stockholmia Publishing and the Committee for Research on Stockholm.
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Strategic crossroads in SAS
Project leader: Professor Hans Sjögren
When the SAS consortium was formed in 1946, SAS only travelled to North and South American destinations. Traffic on European and domestic lines were handled by Norwegian DNL and Swedish ABA. Two years later, all traffic outside Scandinavia was organized in consortia, and in 1951 the national organizations ceased their operations. The SAS consortium was given a unique association form. It is still said to have an “unknown” form in the official national registers. On top of this organization, a joint stock company was formed, SAS AB, which was listed on the stock exchange.
SAS did, with its monopoly on international traffic, benefit from an increase of traffic of passengers and goods for almost 50 years. This increase was a result of the growth of the Swedish economy and the internationalization of Swedish business. After a weak period in the 1970’s, there was a restart in the 1980’s, when SAS developed into a general travel company. The expected deregulation of the market in the 1990’s was met increased cooperation with other airlines, and at the same time a concentration of the business took place. Price pressure increased further in the 00’s and new actors out-competed SAS in different markets. Adding to the troubled economy of SAS was the crises in its subsidiary Spanair. In 2009, SAS was in deep crises, with losses of billions and a real threat of bankruptcy. In less than 20 years the number of employees had been reduced to half, from 40 000 to 20 000.
Previous studies of SAS ends in the 1960’, or they either deal with other sides of SAS than corporate governance, lack scientific basis, or lack access to archive material. The questions in the study connect to international research how deregulation and internationalization challenge national cultures and arrangements, in this case a long lived form of Scandinavian cooperation.
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