This paper pays homage to Professor Borje Johansson's scientific contributions in general and to the field of regional science particularly through a bibliometric approach, highlighting his publishing and citation record, co-authors and co-editors, as well as his theoretical inspirators, fellow researchers and often cited researchers.

Using data for over four decades, we examine the ageing of Swedish municipalities and if there has been convergence or divergence across time and space, where we differentiate across the urban–rural hierarchy. As migration is claimed to be a moderating factor in the ageing of places, we assess how the share of immigrants relates to ageing patterns. Our findings show that the share of older individuals increases in more peripheral localities and that there has been convergence across municipalities. However, the share of foreign population is negatively related to the ageing profile of a place.

In this essay, I share my personal and my family’s experiences of living in the middle of a pandemic in Sweden. Interestingly, due to severe health problems in the family, the pandemic for half a year was a non-issue. As a background for my essay, I present information about the diffusion of the coronavirus in Sweden during the three first waves and about the special Swedish strategy to combat the virus. The Swedish strategy was criticized heavily abroad by politicians and media despite that there before the large outbreak of the pandemic in Europe had been a widespread agreement among the state epidemiologists in the EU to follow a strategy to combat the pandemic of the kind Sweden adopted. I also highlight how public policy authority is divided between the government, the central governmental agencies, the regions and the municipalities, which all according to the Swedish constitution have an independent standing and each have their own areas of responsibility. This explains why the governmental agency the Public Health Agency took the lead in the anti-COVID measures in Sweden and not the Swedish government. At the end, I also present my own preliminary personal evaluation of the way the Swedish authorities dealt with the pandemic. 

The special issue provides a stimulating set of results and theories on regional entrepreneurship and its fundamental role for growth and development. Although the spatial component is analyzed from different perspectives, all the papers highlight the importance of the regional differences in ensuring the appropriate design and implementation of policies aimed at unlocking the potential of regions through entrepreneurship and innovation.

In this paper, we review and comment upon the development of the literature on diversity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In an overview of previous studies and various strands of literatures, we outline and argue that to better understand the intricate dynamic relationships between diversity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and regional development there is a strong need to further develop "the economics of spatial diversity." We further argue that this development may benefit from combining various literatures based upon sound economic micro-foundations, to develop a more absolute understanding of diversity and fulfill the need of more clear mechanisms for future empirical testing. Obviously, this is important both from a research point of view and in order to provide policymakers with a powerful set of analytical tools. We call for more analytical work and more high-quality empirical studies. With a set of papers, we believe this special issue to provide a contribution in this direction.

The purpose of this chapter is to review how industrial policy developed from mainly a ‘passive’ policy focusing market failures to a mainly ‘active’ policy focusing on creating better conditions for growth and international competitiveness. We have discussed the interpretation of the concept of the industrial policy and followed up that discussion with an overview of the arguments for and against the industrial policy. We have highlighted the the-oretical foundations for industrial policy and illustrated the difference between ‘old’ and ʼnew’ industrial policies. We paid particular attention to ‘spatial’ aspect of industrial policy by discussing whether industrial policies should be place-neutral or place-based. The paper ends with a discussion of the difficulties related to the formulation and implementation of industrial policies.

It is well-known that development is uneven across regions. The current academic and political consensus calls for policy interventions targeted towards a more balanced, inclusive and regionally cohesive growth. Yet, despite decades of sizeable policy efforts, there is no clear evidence of economic and social convergence across regions within countries. Entrepreneurship and innovation are proven to be strong drivers of regional economic development, and therefore they offer a source of potential solutions to the challenges imposed by an adverse international context. However, both entrepreneurial and innovative activity are themselves highly unevenly distributed in space, which might in itself be a main cause of the persistent regional inequalities in both developed and developing countries. A deeper understanding of the drivers and the implications of sub-national disparities in entrepreneurship and innovation is therefore a priority for implementing policies aimed at unlocking the potential of all regions in order to maximize their contribution to national growth and prosperity. In this introductory chapter, we create a background and a foundation for the rest of the chapters in this edited volume.

Most rural areas face a range of challenges stemming from the loss of their traditional comparative advantages due to mechanisation, automation, and structural change. In comparison to urban regions, these areas face systemic structural problems, such as lower levels of formal education, ageing populations, and a low and shrinking market potential. Rural areas therefore tend to offer a less fertile environment for entrepreneurship than urban areas provide. In this chapter, we will explore various aspects of rural entrepreneurship by analysing how the volume of entrepreneurship varies in rural areas in Sweden depending upon the size of the local market potential and the development level of the local economic milieu. We will further share insights into rural entrepreneurship by analysing the relative shares of distinct types of entrepreneurship by separating unincorporated and incorporated firms and distinguishing new firms with multiple employees from one-employee firms.

In this paper we analyze how the location of firms influences their innovation outcomes, particularly the complexity of the outcomes. Using three waves of the Community Innovation Survey in Sweden for a balanced panel of firms from 2006 to 2012, we identified a range of innovation outcome categories, i.e. simple and complex (low-, medium-, highly-complex). The backbone of such categorization is based on how firms introduce a combination of Schumpeterian types of innovations (i.e. process, product, marketing, and organizational). Then we consider three regional characteristics that may affect the innovation outcomes of firms, i.e. (i) qualified labor market thickness, (ii) knowledge-intensive services thickness, and (iii) knowledge spillovers extent. We find that regional characteristics do not affect firms’ innovation outcomes ubiquitously. They are only positively associated with those firms introducing the highly-complex innovation outcomes. For firms with less complex innovation outcomes, the regional characteristics do not seem to play a pivotal role. For these innovators, internal resources and formal collaboration with external partners have a significant role.