Abstract
Do local development policies influence local employment growth? Based on a survey to municipal managers in all Swedish municipalities, this is one of the first studies to empirically assess the relationship between reported local development initiatives (entrepreneurial governance (EG)) and growth of local employment. We find a weak but significant association between EG and employment growth for urban municipalities. This suggests that EG is more effective in larger, growing municipalities than in smaller, declining rural areas. Urban municipalities may of course have more resources for entrepreneurial governance than rural ones as they have grown substantially faster for a long period of time. The result thus indicates that EG and growth are in a positive interplay of interaction. When the EG index was divided into three sub-indexes after the entrepreneurial process (discover or create opportunities, collect resources and exploit opportunities) the analyses also showed positive correspondence between some sub-indexes and employment growth for the rural municipalities, indicating that EG is not solely a phenomenon connected to growth in urban, growing municipalities. In sum, the article indicates several avenues through which entrepreneurial governance at local level might be linked to local growth.
Highlights
Though the traditional view of local development maintains that it is largely a function of economic forces at higher levels, local governments are increasingly involved in local development initiatives
This result implies that smaller municipalities are slightly overrepresented among our responses, but it should be noted that not being in the sample is not a meaningful predictor of our dependent or independent variables in the regression analysis
This paper has investigated correspondence between municipal growth initiatives, which we summarize under the caption of entrepreneurial governance (EG), and the development goals these new initiatives are meant to support
Summary
Though the traditional view of local development maintains that it is largely a function of economic forces at higher levels, local governments are increasingly involved in local development initiatives. We show that many local governments address local service provision and local development in their policies and activities. Local governments’ efforts to actively foster expansion and economic development have been described as entrepreneurial behavior [1]. The insights from the entrepreneurship literature have been only weakly integrated with the literature on planning and governance. This paper explores the concept of entrepreneurship in relation to development initiatives undertaken by Swedish municipalities. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1. To explore the applicability of knowledge in modern entrepreneurship research in the context of local development initiatives The purpose of this study is twofold: 1. To explore the applicability of knowledge in modern entrepreneurship research in the context of local development initiatives
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