In 1939 the British Government tried to assess Soviet war potential in order to know more about their potential ally, as part of the negotiations concerning an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance. British assessments of Soviet economic and military strength (and the internal stability of the Stalin...

This paper will focus upon the Swedish consumption of sugar, a product that illustrates the shift from being a luxury to being a mass-consumed commodity. Very little attention has been paid to the commodity of sugar by Swedish scholars, at least concerning the period prior to the introduction of...

The paper presents input-output tables for the Swedish economy for 1885, 1898 and 1913. These tables are used to explore structural change and to decompose Swedish economic growth in 1885–1898 and 1898–1913 into different demand sources: exports, import substitution and home market growth....

The standard of living in the pre-industrial world is an interesting but challenging subject. No single method alone can solve the problem. In order to grasp the standard of living several methods must be used, and work must be done across discipline borderlines. In this paper I discuss methods...

This paper presents a new price series for sugar in Sweden, or more exactly Stockholm, in a long-term perspective (1624–1900). Prior to this, no price data has been available from Sweden for this commodity. The paper is devoted to presenting source-related and technical aspects of the price...

After 1870 Swedish agriculture was transformed in the direction of more animal husbandry. Small farmers in particular specialized in animal produce. Yet, agricultural protectionism primarily served the interest of large landowners specializing in bread-grain production. The paper explores the...

This working paper explores the impact of the globalization process 1970-2000 on two manufacturing industries in the Gothenburg area –SKF and Volvo. Three aspects of the process are highlighted: the development of new Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the increased mobility of...

Sugar was of the utmost importance for the development of a transatlantic trade during the early modern era. This working paper explores the impact of institutions and institutional changes of the colonial trade in sugar focusing on one country on the European semi-periphery, namely Sweden....

Trends in wage-rental ratios have figured prominently in the recent literature on factor price convergence and globalisation in the late nineteenth century. In that literature Sweden has been described as a free trade country whose wage-rental ratio exhibited a distinguished upward trend before...

This paper focuses on the development of property rights to village com-mons, as they appear in the court rolls of a legal district in Sweden in the late 17th and the early 18th century. A development of agrarian property rights, from comparably attenuated towards more exclusive and private...