This article explores the establishment of fideikommiss in Sweden and Finland from 1686 to 1975. Fideikommiss was the right to entail land to a single heir, thus preserving it for future generations. By using probate inventories, the extent of fideikommiss has been measured, revealing that they were mainly established between 1720 and 1810, when the right to found new ones was abolished. The establishment of fideikommiss partly responded to increased competition for land from non-nobles. The higher nobility, who had the means to set aside land since inherited land could not be entailed, were the main founders. Fideikommiss comprised five per cent of the kingdom's area and were mainly established in the southern regions, where the best arable land was located. In 1964, a new law began the process of abolishing fideikommiss, although more than half had already been dissolved between 1810 and 1945 due to economic crises. Notably, the smaller and medium-sized fideikommiss in the less fertile western and eastern regions of Sweden, often accompanied by ironworks, were the first to be dissolved. In contrast, the largest fideikommiss remained, most of which were located in the very fertile southern plains. These undoubtedly preserved the nobility as large landowners.
Previous studies have found very high levels of income inequality in Finland during the late 19th and early 20th centuries [Roikonen, P. (2022). Income inequality in Finland, 1865-2019. Scandinavian Economic History Review, 70(3), 234-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2021.1901774; Roikonen, P., & Heikkinen, S. (2020). A Kuznets rise and a Piketty fall: Income inequality in Finland, 1865-1934. European Review of Economic History, 24(1), 46-79.]. These results align with findings from the other Nordic countries. This applies to both Roikonen & Heikkinen [(2020). A Kuznets rise and a Piketty fall: Income inequality in Finland, 1865-1934. European Review of Economic History, 24(1), 46-79.] and Roikonen [(2022). Income inequality in Finland, 1865-2019. Scandinavian Economic History Review, 70(3), 234-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2021.1901774]. This study strives to improve their estimations by homogenising the tax unit population with the removal of corporations, by estimating the average income within the top bracket using more realistic assumptions, and by extrapolating the income share of the exempted tax units with an exponential distribution. The top 1 percent's share in 19th century falls significantly in comparison to these previous estimates. The Gini coefficient, however, changed gradually. It is argued that the new estimate of the top 1 percent's share aligns with well-known theses on the development of inequality under industrialisation and urbanisation [Kuznets, S. (1955). Economic growth and income inequality. American Economic Review, 45(1), 1-28; Marx, K. (2024). Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (P. Reitter & P. North, Eds., Transl. Paul Reitter). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1872); Milanovic, B., Lindert, P. H., & Williamson, J. G. (2011). Pre-industrial inequality. Economic Journal, 121(551), 255-272. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02403.x]. At the same time, the trends in the Gini coefficient suggests that the changes in overall inequality may have been more muted.
This article analyses the political economy of state ownership and privatisation in Spain through the lens of strategic selectivity [Jessop, B. (2002). The future of the capitalist state. Polity Press] and recent theories of hybrid state capitalism. It argues that the creation and endurance of the Sociedad Estatal de Participaciones Industriales (SEPI) reflect not a withdrawal of the state from the economy but its strategic adaptation. By adopting a hybrid holding structure, the Spanish state developed a mechanism that provided managerial autonomy and economic flexibility while maintaining long-term strategic influence. SEPI can be understood as a state holding company responsible for managing the Spanish state's portfolio of corporate shareholdings, although legally it is constituted as a public law entity operating largely under private law. This selective institutional design allowed the state to navigate the constraints of European integration and fiscal discipline, transforming its role from a direct producer to a sophisticated strategic shareholder.
Equity issues are a crucial part of properly functioning financial markets as they facilitate the allocation of capital to its most efficient use. Historically, publicly listed firms have often had superior opportunities to raise new equity capital from investors. This paper analyses equity issuances and their role as a source of capital to Finnish firms listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange (HSE) from 1912 to 1981. The results show that the role of the stock exchange in helping companies raise new equity capital in Finland was perhaps more significant than previously thought. The results also show that economic and stock market development influences the timing of the seasoned equity issues. The decision to allow companies to deduct dividends paid on newly issued equity since 1969 has clearly increased cash issues. A newly updated and extended historical database on corporate capital actions for the Finnish stock market is used in the analysis.
This paper investigates the role of total factor productivity (TFP), often used to proxy technological change, in building resilience against economic shrinking. Technological change is an important engine of economic growth, yet its role in helping to avoid GDP per capita contractions in the long run is less clear. Increasingly, research is showing that avoiding negative growth episodes, or shrinking, may be equally important for sustainable development. TFP is the primary differentiator in between-country incomes, yet it has not been studied from a shrinking perspective. This study employs a novel growth accounting extension to decompose TFP into positive and negative performance components. Using a global country sample and selected case studies reveals distinct positive and negative TFP performance patterns across country groupings between 1961 and 2019. Negative TFP performance is found to be the key limiting factor for catch-up growth in lower-income countries. High-income countries have mitigated negative TFP more effectively, with declining positive TFP performance lowering their trend TFP growth in recent decades. Resilience against shrinking appears to be a necessary, though insufficient, condition for trend TFP growth to emerge, suggesting that it is a key facilitator of catch-up growth.
This article investigates the goals and strategies of Swedish business interest associations (BIAs) in relation to postwar European economic integration between 1949 and 1965. By situating Swedish BIAs within the context of European business organisations, it identifies three distinct phases. The first phase (1949-1955) was characterised by caution, the second (1956-1959) by a proactive strategy, and the third (1960-1965) by consolidation. The analysis draws on concepts of the associative actions of BIAs - the pressure from members and the need to achieve external efficiency - but also highlights the agency of key individuals, in particular the president of the Swedish Federation of Industry, Axel Iveroth. A key argument is that the strategies adopted were shaped by how policy issues were perceived - either as domestic concerns or European matters, which, in turn, affected which specific national branch of organised business was mobilised. The article contributes to the debate on the role of BIAs in postwar Europe, especially concerning business actors from non-EEC countries. The engagement of the Swedish BIAs and their top representatives constituted a gradual process of strategically embedding and positioning Swedish business interests in the European business world.
This paper examines the interplay between fishing communities, marine ecosystems, and institutional arrangements along the Basque coast from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival evidence, it analyses how Basque maritime guilds built a resilient system for managing common-pool resources through monopolistic control over access to fishing grounds and fish markets, underpinned by their role in the naval recruitment system. Guilds operated as risk-management institutions that helped communities cope with ecological and economic uncertainties through the collective organisation of fishing activities, regulated fishing seasons, centralised auctions, and mutual aid mechanisms. However, this framework underwent profound transformations in the late nineteenth century due to institutional reforms and technological advances. The abolition of the Matr & iacute;cula de Mar (Maritime Registry) in 1873 undermined the legal foundation of the guilds' monopoly, while steam trawling introduced new pressures on fishing grounds and markets. Rather than collapsing, many guilds adapted, preserving elements of their risk-pooling and coordination functions. Their persistence points to the resilience of informal institutions rooted in shared community norms and practices.
This paper covers the recent history of cross-border M&As by State-owned enterprises (SOEs) from emerging economies to Western Europe between the Sovereign Debt Crises (2011) and the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020). Academic studies posit that cross-border M&As became a new channel for emerging economy SOEs to enhance their technological capabilities, attributing this to the advantage of operating in close ties with national governments that allocate resources and align strategies to pursue international expansion and greater innovative activity. This article contrasts this view in the light of a historical analysis. The dataset comprises 953 cross-border deals of government-owned companies over the period 2011-2022, retrieved from the Zephyr database. Significantly, the decade between the financial crisis and the pandemic marked the reappearance of state ownership in Europe under a new guise, the foreign control of state-owned multinational enterprises (SOMNEs) in technology-based sectors; however, emerging markets SOEs played only a little role, despite their relevance in the academic and policy debate.
This paper documents changing occupational structure and skill composition during industrialisation in Sweden. Using population censuses and the HISCO/HISCLASS scheme, the paper documents a shift from unskilled to more-skilled occupations at the aggregate level. The evidence is consistent with the idea that the structural shift away from agriculture is associated with skill upgrading, though substantial portion of this upgrading took place within the major sectors. Within manufacturing, there was a shift from artisanal workshops to factories but the evidence for Sweden suggests this transition was not connected to deskilling or job polarisation as observed in the United States or England. The paper puts forward the farmwork-to-services hypothesis, arguing that expansion of the service sector offered new opportunities for occupational upgrading. This transition was particularly important for women, who faced higher barriers to entry within the manufacturing sector.
This paper studies the Grand Duchy of Lithuania between 1386 and 1569, asking if there was a relationship between its institutional development and economic outcomes. Lithuania developed a more sophisticated institutional environment by the 1490s, as it transitioned from personal governance by a warrior elite to a corporation of landowners bound by public law and shared beliefs. Structural breaks in the trends of new manors and churches suggest that elite rents significantly increased around the same time, indicating economic expansion. However, urbanisation grew slowly, while GDP per capita and health data stagnated. Expanding rents and the overall economy likely did not outpace population growth, illustrating that limited access orders cannot deliver development equitably.
This article looks at how the Swedish state argued for why it should seize the control of breweries during the twentieth century. The idea of nationalising the brewery industry had been discussed since the interwar period, but it wasn't until the 1970s when state involvement in the sector would accelerate when it bought the market leading brewery. By investigating the economy of state ownership and the political debates concerning the brewery industry, this article finds that several factors aligned to make state involvement more desirable compared to previous decades. The cost of buy-out, perceived alcohol policy concerns, as well as political alliances concerning state ownership, alcohol and the brewery industry are highlighted as the three most important explanations. The case of brewery takeovers stresses socio-political motives for state ownership in Sweden. The lifespan of the state brewery also highlights the balancing act between political and economic objectives faced by SOEs, which became particularly difficult given that alcohol policy objectives were present. The privatisation of the breweries also reveals some political and constitutional peculiarities.
A large literature considers family planning programs with a focus on birth control and finds that access reduces fertility. In this paper, I study the fertility effects of access to a Danish family planning program introduced in 1939 and designed as a political response to decades of declining fertility and widespread use of illegal abortions. I exploit variation in the timing of program implementation and use digitised data for Danish towns and counties from 1921 to 1947 to estimate the causal fertility effects using the synthetic control method. I find significant and positive non-marital fertility effects of program access but no effects on marital fertility. Suggestive evidence indicates that mothers, who in the absence of the program would have aborted illegally, now give birth and either adopt away or raise the child outside of marriage.
This article presents a new dataset for the Norwegian fishery exports from 1731 to 1794. The total value of fishing exports followed a U-shaped pattern, with fishery exports increasing until the mid-1750s, before declining the next two decades and then rebounding towards the end of the century. This pattern is closely tied to a change in the export composition: herring became the main fishery export commodity as its export value increased steadily towards the mid-1750s, before declining from the mid-1750s onwards. In contrast, stockfish regained its historical role as the main fishery export following the 1750s, whilst clipfish made its breakthrough as a major export commodity. This article also highlights the role of individual Norwegian ports, with Bergen being the clearly dominant fishery export hub. This article utilises digitised archival material and other sources to construct both aggregate measures and commodity-level data, allowing for a detailed analysis of Norwegian fishery exports during the latter parts of the Danish-Norwegian monarchy. This article adds to the growing literature on trade in the eighteenth century, which contributes to our understanding of early globalisation by studying the co-movement of prices in different markets and the impact of major conflicts.
When Svenska T & auml;ndsticks AB established a match stick company and factory, La Consolidada Industrial in Havana, Cuba, during the early 1950s, it was met by heavy resistance and political problems from trade unions and other factory owners. Central to this resistance was the view of Svenska T & auml;ndsticks as foreign capitalists seeking to undermine Cuban industry. In response, or in anticipation of this perceived risk, La Consolidada Industrial attempted to display itself as fully Cuban, with only incidental ties to Sweden, as well as sought political allegiance with the government, including the Batista regime. Representations of nationality thus became a central factor for La Consolidada Industrial's business strategy and would remain important up until its eventual nationalization by the Castro regime.
How do policymakers and management in state-owned enterprises (SOE) handle the tension between original policy goals, government short-term needs, and the pressures associated with operating in a competitive market? In this paper, we examine the history of Swedish state-owned banks between 1960 and 1985 to answer this question and analyse how changes in the goals of an SOE originate and evolve, and how this varies between different state-owned firms. We find that as original policy goals become outdated, management and policymakers' attention may shift to meet government needs and market demand. During the 1960s, the Swedish government's need for additional housing loans led to a shift in lending priorities within Kreditbanken. Simultaneously, Postbanken's leadership reinterpreted the bank's original goals, from increasing the number of savers to promoting savings in general. This reinterpretation allowed the bank to pursue strategies focused on gaining market share and increasing profitability while still adhering to original mandates. When the two banks merged to form PKBanken in 1974, it represented a drastic change at the policy level by creating a state-owned bank explicitly focused on competition and profitability. However, this change only reaffirmed the more market-oriented approach that had originated within Postbanken the previous decade.
This paper documents the evolution of income differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in Sweden throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Using newly digitised data on income taxes, this paper demonstrates that the skill premium decreased throughout 1900-1950, and most rapidly from 1930 onward. This is similar to the fall in skill premium documented for the United States. However, unlike in the United States, the fall in skill premium in Sweden cannot be attributed to an increase in the supply of high-school graduates. Rather, this paper shows that the incomes of low-skilled workers were catching up to those at the top of the skill distribution. Part of this development was due to feminisation of skilled employment, shift from agriculture to manufacturing and services, and changing occupational composition. The paper suggests other mechanisms for the falling skill premium in Sweden, such as informal schooling, emigration, and trade union activity.
