The purpose of this paper is to examine the role played by built heritages and cultural environments, alongside other locational factors, in explaining the growth of human capital in Sweden. We distinguish between urban, natural and cultural qualities as different sources of regional attractiveness and estimate their influence on the observed growth of individuals with at least three years of higher education during 2001–2010. Neighborhood-level data are used, and unobserved heterogeneity and spatial dependencies are modeled by employing random effects estimations and an instrumental variable approach. Our findings indicate that the local supply of built heritages and cultural environments explain a significant part of human capital growth in Sweden. Results suggest that these types of cultural heritages are important place-based resources with a potential to contribute to improved regional attractiveness and growth.

This book addresses poverty and well-being, equity, and efficiency in selected African countries. The chapters focus on three main topics: studies in the measurement and analysis of wellbeing and vulnerability to poverty, women's empowerment, and the dynamics and determinants of income and efficiency among smallholders. The chapters in the first section examine poverty, well-being, and vulnerability to poverty, as well as social exclusion, with a focus on households in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Tanzania. They highlight the need to consider multidimensional measures of well-being and vulnerability to poverty, the need to address the distribution of vulnerability across different segments of the population, as well as the importance of developing public policies aimed at poverty reduction and promoting the well-being of the poor. The next section deals with issues related to women’s empowerment, including a multidimensional case study of women’s empowerment in Ghana and women’s access to microfinance services in Ethiopia. The final section focuses on dynamics and determinants of income and efficiency among farm households in Ethiopia and Uganda.

The well-being of families and their children is given high priority in development goals. Children’s well-being in Africa is important since the growing number of children is the greatest resource of this continent. Rwanda was one of the first countries that ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The country, despite its very low GDP per capita, also has one of the best child well-being indicators in Africa. In the recent past the country has also had two important achievements: protection of children by establishing the National Commission for Children and launching a Strategy for National Child Care Reform. The measures aim to protect children’s rights and integrate children into families that are supported to provide needed care to them. These achievements are largely the result of strong laws and policies many of which have been developed with support from UNICEF. Investments in children’s well-being will help in addressing many persistent difficulties that society may have to face in the future. What happens during the early years is of crucial importance for every child’s development. This period offers great opportunities, but children are also vulnerable to negative influences. The objective of this research is to estimate multidimensional well-being of children and their families in Rwanda. The aim is to compute an overall well-being index decomposed into its underlying main components. The households are ranked by the level of well-being and by various household and community characteristics. The results shed light on the state and changes in the well-being of children and their families in Rwanda indicating which provinces and districts offer relatively better conditions for them. This can serve as a model for public policies aimed at improving general well-being in the country.

The well-being of families and their children is given high priority in development goals. Children’s well-being in Africa is important since the growing number of children is the greatest resource of this continent. Rwanda was one of the first countries that ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The country, despite its very low GDP per capita, also has one of the best child well-being indicators in Africa. In the recent past the country has also had two important achievements: protection of children by establishing the National Commission for Children and launching a Strategy for National Child Care Reform. The measures aim to protect children’s rights and integrate children into families that are supported to provide needed care to them. These achievements are largely the result of strong laws and policies many of which have been developed with support from UNICEF. Investments in children’s well-being will help in addressing many persistent difficulties that society may have to face in the future. What happens during the early years is of crucial importance for every child’s development. This period offers great opportunities, but children are also vulnerable to negative influences. The objective of this research is to estimate multidimensional well-being of children and their families in Rwanda. The aim is to compute an overall well-being index decomposed into its underlying main components. The households are ranked by the level of well-being and by various household and community characteristics. The results shed light on the state and changes in the well-being of children and their families in Rwanda indicating which provinces and districts offer relatively better conditions for them. This can serve as a model for public policies aimed at improving general well-being in the country. 

Europe is in a phase of vast transition regarded both from a demographic and economic-structural point of view. Studies have shown that demographic development differs a lot when comparing urban regions with more sparsely populated peripheral regions. These diverging patterns are shown to be especially strong in the northern and eastern parts of Europe where a redistribution of people contributes to a concentration process to the metropolitan or big city areas as well as to shrinkage and depopulating of rural and peripheral areas. This paper empirically addresses these differing demographic development paths by analyzing the influence of key underlying demographic factors on population change across European regions. For the stated purpose the paper applies typologies based on both economic and demographic structure and a cross-regional regression model. The economic-structural typology developed within the ESPON/EDORA-project is used to describe and analyze economic-structural factors and a typology based on demographic characteristics that classify regions as either shrinking or expanding in terms of population is used in the empirical assessment. Findings indicate that age structure is of importance with regard to population changes and there exists an east-west divide between the growing west and declining east where the declining sectors are more frequent. It is also shown that large and densely populated regions have better preconditions for growth and fewer risks for shrinking than small and sparsely populated ones. 

This paper estimates capitalisation effects of farm attributes with a particular focus on the decoupled Single Farm Payment (SFP) on prices. The spatial analysis employs a sample of mainly small- and medium-sized Swedish farm transactions sold all across Sweden; the results from a spatial multiple-membership model suggest that decoupled SFP has no influence on farm prices. Prices are profoundly influenced by residential characteristics and accessibility to urban amenities. Spatial heterogeneity is found for both regional and local levels, and a large spatial spillover effect is found between neighbouring farms. Results are confirmed by sensitivity analyses.

Rural households in many different contexts have been found to diversify their income sources allowing them to spread their risks and to smoothen consumption. Generating diversified incomes for a majority of the rural poor is an essential component of a successful rural development strategy. This paper identifies the determinants of income diversification among Rwandan households using unique panel data obtained from the Integrated Households Living Conditions Surveys of 2011 and 2014. It applies a binary logit panel model to a representative sample of 3,839 households across Rwanda controlling for latent household specific factors. It also conducts a Hausman test the results of which show that the random effect estimates were more efficient than fixed effect estimates (Chi2=20.73 and Prob>Chi2=0.1891). The results reveal that education, access to ICT and urban areas were among the most important factors that influenced livelihood diversification given that p <0.05. We also found that other measures of household specific factors were important (for example, the age and gender of the household head along with asset endowments). From these results, it is recommended that professional training, internet access through phones and wireless and urbanization should be enhanced so as to enable households to diversify their sources of income and thus improve food security for their family members.

Building on the neo-endogenous rural development model and the resource-based view of the firm, this paper investigates the role of place-based amenities for new firm formation. Empirically, we employ a full-population dataset encompassing new firms in Sweden from 2009 to 2016, combined with geocoded datasets with the spatial distribution of nature- and culture-based amenities. The results show that local amenities are indeed important factors in determining the rate of new firm formation. Estimating the model across urban and rural neighborhoods show that amenities are relatively more important in explaining new firm formation in rural areas as compared to urban. As such, our study contributes to the literature on diversification of the economies of rural areas by pointing at the important role that place-based amenities may play for an entrepreneurially-driven development of less developed and/or rural areas.

In 2010, the European Union adopted the notion ‘smart’ in its new ten-year growth strategy Europe 2020 stating that Europe should become a smart, sustainable, and inclusive economy. The broad and policy-oriented concepts of smart growth and smart development are part of the strategy introduced as a response to the observed low growth rates of innovation and productivity across European regions. In all its essence, the growth strategy states that smart growth supports sustainable development, which is achieved by promoting research, innovation, and knowledge in order to attain regional economic growth. What is made less clear is how the concept of smart growth can be translated to fit a diverse set of rural regions. Other outstanding issues discussed in this paper relate to the possibility to measure and empirically address the outcome of policies for smart rural development. Hence, in this paper we conceptually analyse and bring together the ideas that underlie the logic behind policies for smart growth by focusing on smart growth from the perspective of rural regions. The paper also presents indicators of smart rural development and analyses their relevance in future empirical studies.

Amenities play an important role in explaining regional attractiveness as they increase the competition between places and the demand for housing. This paper contributes to the literature on valuations of place-based amenities by estimating hedonic prices for a differentiated set of amenities, and by examining the link between urban density and amenity valuations. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 8319 single-family home sales observed during the period 2001–2011. Results show that amenities are valued differently depending on their size, the relationship between size and distance and neighbourhood characteristics. Differentiating among a set of nature- and culture based amenities shows that it is profoundly the value of proximity to open space that vary with neighbourhood density. Results are robust when testing for non-constant implicit prices over different time periods and novel to the literature on valuation of open spaces using the hedonic price model.

This paper studies the effects of land use consolidation on consumption growth of farm households in Rwanda. Data on 1 920 households, observed in two time periods, are used to estimate a first-differenced model using an instrumental variables estimator, which allow the analysis to account for selection bias and placement effects. Results show no significant effect of land use consolidation on consumption growth and the results are robust to changes in model specification and estimation method. Rather, the results point to the importance of factors such as education, rural infrastructure and market linkages in the consumption growth process. These results highlight the need to consider that alternative public investments, that reduce households’ transaction costs, may be better able to target rural farmers that operate under conditions such as land scarcity, high population pressure and high risk linked to rapidly changing climate conditions.

This paper studies the role played by factors that are considered central to the concept of smart specialization on firm performance in a European context. The focus is on the type of spatial spillovers that occur at the level of the firm, which are connected to technological relatedness and knowledge externalities. The influence of such externalities is studied using firm-level data on firms located across Europe and unobserved heterogeneity and spatial dependencies are modelled by employing a multilevel model. Diverging patterns across the urban-rural range are studied by applying a regional typology. Findings indicate that measures thought to reflect smart specialization are positively associated with firm performance. It is also found that indicators of smart specialization do not affect firm performance homogenously across the studied regions.

This paper uses the hedonic housing model to assess economic values to high value meadows and grazings located in rural settings. The hypothesis is that residential purchase prices include premiums for properties located in the surrounding areas of such environments. The dataset consist of 7565 property transactions sold during the period 1977-2007. The main findings are that houses located in the immediate surrounding area of these lands were on average 2.6 per cent more expensive which implies that the size of the premium approximately equals €3200 for these properties.

This paper studies the role played by land consolidation for consumption growth in Rwanda. Data on 1 920 farm households, observed in two-time periods, are used to estimate a first-differenced model with matched control groups to account for selection bias and placement effects. Results indicate that an increase in the amount of land in consolidation result in higher consumption growth, results are robust to changes in model specification and estimation method. Results also point to the importance of market linkages and external economies present in urban areas, indicating that locational factors play a key in the consumption growth process.

Natural amenities play an important role in explaining intra-regional economic growth, because they increase the competition between places and the relative demand for housing. This paper shows that these relationships are strongly location-specific, such that the magnitude and the direction, of value assessments vary across the urban surface. The analysis in this study addresses spatial heterogeneity in the valuations of preserved open space amenities using Swedish house price data. The results show that marginal valuations of open space amenities are high in locations that are characterised by high population and housing densities and low or insignificant in areas where undeveloped lands are abundant, thus, supporting the hypothesis that a greater competition for those, locational attributes that are in high demand, yet locally scarce, results in higher marginal prices.

This thesis includes an introductory chapter and four individual papers. The papers are held together by concepts associated with price formation in real estate markets, differentiated goods and the local character of land and housing markets. The first two papers focus on the markets for land and agricultural property and the two succeeding studies on housing markets. The first study examines regional variations of Swedish agricultural land prices. The associated empirical model follows the form of earlier literature in testing the influence of expected returns from the current agricultural use of land and the potential for non-agricultural use on prices. The use of market transacted land and the inclusion of decoupled income support to farmers, among a set of agricultural and non-agricultural factors, distinguishes this study from earlier empirical work.

The second paper relates to the first by its focus on decoupled income support, but here the analysis extends to the micro level and to the study of price formation in the market for agricultural property. The study applies a spatial multilevel model to study variations in price determinants across and within local and regional markets.

The third paper is devoted to the analysis of housing prices and their relation to open landscape amenities. The spatial analysis employs two geographical databases containing single-family home sales and preserved open spaces. In order to address the local character of urban housing markets and intraurban heterogeneity in amenity valuations the study applies a geographically weighted regression approach.

The last paper focuses on the market for second homes with a particular emphasis on urban-rural interrelations. The paper is motivated by a growing demand for natural amenities and by the awareness that urban areas are becoming increasingly attractive markets for second homes.

This paper studies the effects of investment support from the common agricultural policy on labour and total factor productivity of agricultural firms in Sweden. Detailed firm-level data on 34 300 firms are used to estimate a matched panel model that relates firm productivity to a series of factors reflecting internal and external characteristics. The recently developed Coarsened Exact Matching method is used to estimate matched control groups and handle selection bias. Findings show a positive and significant treatment effect of investment support on firm productivity, but only for small firms. The analysis also reveals that an increase in the size of the support in relation to firm income has a negative and significant impact on productivity for all firms. Differentiating between various types of investment supports indicates heterogeneous treatment effects. The policy instrument can improve its efficiency if targeted to small firms and investments that have a link to public good provision.

This paper studies the effects of external economies of scale on households’ involvement in the non-farm sector. The focus of the paper is on the type of knowledge spill-overs that occur at the level of individuals; these relate to learning processes and non-market interactions. Nationally representative data on 8,100 households surveyed in 2006 and 2009 are used and unobserved heterogeneity and spatial dependencies are modelled by employing a multi-level model and instruments in the form of clustered cantered means. The findings show that in addition to other household characteristics related to education, asset endowments and credit availability, measures of agglomeration economies are positively associated with smallholders’ degree of involvement in non-farm activities. The results indicate that there exist significant scale efficiencies associated with local markets and that an important part of the capacity to diversify lies outside households, residing instead in their locations.

This paper tests for external effects of local economic activity on non-farm income using survey data from Rwanda. The empirical analysis uses a random sample of 8071 households and a multilevel model to mitigate correlations between individual outcomes and geographical variables. Findings show a positive association between a higher initial local diversity of economic activity and non-farm earnings. Results also point to the importance of access to markets and services indicating that an important part of a household’s capacity to earn non-farm income is associated with factors that are external to the household.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence of related and unrelated industry diversity on retail firm failure with a focus on Swedish retailers. The paper develops competing hypotheses from organizational theory and the economics of agglomeration concerning the survival chances of retail firms located in geographic proximity. Hypotheses are tested using a hazard model and a sample of 48,953 retail firms observed during 2002–2010. Key findings show that increases in the local share of similar retail firms is positively related to the risk of failure while there is a negative relation between increases in local industry diversity and the risk of failure. These results indicate that knowledge transfer from a diverse set of industries are important in lowering the failure risk. Differentiating among small and specialized retail firms indicate that there is significant intra-industry heterogeneity in the influence of local industrial composition on the likelihood of failure.

This paper estimates a spatial hedonic model to examine the influence of urban and natural amenities on second home prices in south Sweden, incorporating local and regional heterogeneity. With the results obtained in this paper, several important relationships between amenities and second home prices are revealed and price formation in this particular study region is indicated to be strongly related to place-specific factors, regional context and amenities. Key findings show that natural amenities have a significant influence on pricing of second homes when located in regions classified as rural, whereas access to an attractive local house market is shown to be more important for prices of urban second homes.

Relative to other developing regions, the role of land consolidation in increasing crop yields is poorly understood in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper examines the role of land use consolidation on agricultural productivity among smallholder farmers in Rwanda. Household-level data are used to estimate a fixed-effects model with matched control groups to mitigate selection bias. The study finds a positive association between land use consolidation and crop yields, but only among farm households with landholdings greater than one hectare, which is well above the average farm size in Rwanda. Findings also point to the importance of non-organic fertilisers and irrigation as there appear to be significant benefits associated with further increases in their use among the consolidated farms. 

Jordbruksverket är förvaltningsmyndighet för det svenska landsbygdsprogrammet som har som övergripande målsättning att bidra till en ekonomisk, ekologisk och socialt hållbar utveckling av landsbygden. Politiken på området inriktas bland annat mot att ge stöd för kollektiva nyttigheter som finns på landsbygden och som många gånger är beroende av ett aktivt lantbruk. De svenska ängs- och betesmarkerna är ett sådant exempel på kollektiva nyttigheter som kan komma många till del, inte endast ägaren av marken. Syftet med den här studien är att analysera frågan om huruvida värdet av dessa kollektiva nyttigheter går att spåra i priser på fastigheter som har närhet till ängs- och betesmarker.

A random sample of households in Rwanda are used to estimate the effects of the one cow policy on consumption and crop production during 2010-2014. A first-differenced model that takes into account the selection bias and placement effect associated with the policy and heterogeneity across householdsis estimated. Findings show a positive effect of receiving a cow on crop production, indicating that fertilizers provided by the cattle has enabled households to increase their agricultural production. Findings also point to the importance of knowledge and experience of rearing livestock for the outcome on consumption to realize.

This study estimates the effects of the one cow policy on per capita consumption and the value of per hectare crop production in Rwanda using a random sample of households observed twice (2010 and 2014). A model that accounts for heterogeneity across households and the selection bias and placement effect associated with the policy is estimated. Findings show that receiving a cow has a positive effect on crop production indicating that the cattle has enabled households to become more productive on the farm. Results point to the importance of household's knowledge and experience of rearing livestock for the outcome of receiving a cow.

This volume is a collection of studies on poverty and well-being, vulnerability to poverty, women’s empowerment and smallholders’ efficiency in selected African countries. It has a collection of 12 empirical studies that have an overall focus on poverty, well-being and vulnerability to poverty and includes contributions by 19 authors. The studies aim at increasing our knowledge about the factors that influence poverty and well-being. This is important as it can help alleviate many of the persistent challenges observed across Africa. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

This paper analyses determinants of agricultural land prices in Sweden with a particular focus on location-specific factors. An asset-pricing model is used to decompose agricultural land prices into expected returns from land in its current agricultural use and expected returns from its potential use. The model is estimated in a cross regional context where explanatory factors relate to regional variations in land productivity, agricultural support payments and urbanising influences. Results indicate that both agricultural and non-agricultural factors are influential determinants to the price of agricultural land. Estimating marginal effects across the distribution of the dependent variable, non-agricultural factors are shown to be more important in regions that have high agricultural land prices, whereas, income support to farmers in the form of the decoupled single farm payment is shown to be most influential in regions with low agricultural land prices.

This paper presents a national-scale analysis of the determinants of agricultural land prices. The empirical analysis is based on an asset-pricing model that decomposes current agricultural land prices into two different components; returns to land in agricultural use and potential returns from the use of land in alternative sectors. In the empirical application of this model capitalization of returns related to agricultural use is captured by spatial variations in natural conditions for agricultural production and the size of government support to agriculture. Capitalization of returns to alternative use of land relate to local rural amenities and urban pressure in terms of accessibility conditions. The key findings are that land fertility, support to landowners in the form of decoupled single farm payments and accessibility to urban attributes are the main determinants of agricultural land prices.

In this study of Swedish farms from 2007 to 2016, we estimate the effects of investment support from the Common Agricultural Policy on indicators of farm performance, focusing on long-term effects. To isolate the impact and alleviate problems of selection bias, we employ a counterfactual empirical design using Coarsened Exact Matching and dynamic panel fixed-effects estimations. The average treatment effect on the treated estimates show a positive and significant long-term improvement of farm performance with regard to productivity and turnover. However, the results indicate significant time lags between investments and accumulated observable effects, as we find most short-term effects of the subsidy to be insignificant.

The purpose of this paper is to address the hypotheses of complete urbanization and the post urban world with an emphasis on the agricultural sector. The paper studies spatial and temporal changes in land-use and agricultural activities in one rapidly growing metropolitan region, the Stockholm region. We explore the number and size of agricultural firms, changes in their main activity and trends of diversification and land prices for various types of land and location, all in a disaggregated spatial dimension. The results contribute to a deeper understanding of agriculture's function in metropolitan regions and shed new light on the possibilities of the agricultural sector to transform in a world where the traditional urban-rural relations are ceasing to exist.

This chapter aims to contribute to the research on innovation, entrepreneurship and their determinants by investigating these issues in two Swedish regions - Jonkoping County and Jamtland. Jonkoping County is representative for a rural and peri-urban area, with a central location in Sweden. Firm innovativeness is an important dimension of entrepreneurship and is regarded as playing a vital role for firm growth, including for firms located in rural areas. The ability of firms to renew themselves is becoming increasingly important from the perspective of firm survival and growth. The county has a strong entrepreneurial and small firm tradition in the manufacturing sector. The town of Gnosjo is famous for its “entrepreneurial spirit” and flexible small firms that both compete and cooperate. The county has a strong entrepreneurial and small firm tradition in manufacturing. Interesting regional differences emerge when looking at the factors that can facilitate innovation, i.e. firm size and human capital characteristics.

The ability of firms and regions to renew themselves is becoming increasingly important from the perspective of survival and competitiveness. Renewal, technological change, or innovation is also commonly perceived as the main driver of economic growth, which implies that innovation is important from both a micro- and a macro perspective. Following Schumpeter, innovation should be regarded as a broad concept that incorporates not only new products, but also e.g. new production processes and new ways of doing business. This chapter focuses on the determinants of entrepreneurship and innovation in rural regions. The specific determinants for innovation and entrepreneurship can be broadly defined in three groups; knowledge, diversity and amenities. External knowledge in terms of collaboration with other firms and access to a diverse, but related, knowledge base provides potential determinants for innovation, as well as entrepreneurship.