Sanitation lags development achievements in other sectors, and is one of the unmet targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This article explores the gap between sanitation policy intentions and outcomes in a comparative study of sanitation sector performance in Rwanda and Uganda with ‘good’ and ‘limited or no’ reported MDG progress respectively. The gap between strong political will, as asserted in policy commitments, statements, reforms and coordination efforts on one hand, and insufficient resources and actual implementation on the other, is examined by drawing on policy and implementation theories in a multi-level governance framework. Progress in Rwanda is explained by stronger political leadership and support for sanitation, stringent performance monitoring, an institutionalised and inclusive community-based approach, and investment in rural sanitation. We further argue that with households having much discretion over private actions for sanitation and hygiene, ‘backward mapping’ can contribute to improve understanding on how to close the implementation gap.

This research explores the use of psychometric techniques to improve understanding of psychological mechanisms underlying judgment of excreta as fertilizer in agriculture including other excreta related activities. Participants consisted of environmental health students, smallholder farmers and traders in rural and urban Rwanda and Uganda. The finding reveals an inverse relationship between risk and benefit judgments. This relationship holds for the three groups of participants with significant risk-benefit correlations of p<.0001. This finding is consistent with other studies showing that affect plays a key role in risk perception, judgment and decision making.Building on this finding, we conclude that individuals with high risk and low benefit judgment for excreta related practices would eschew them or emphasize strict standards. Individuals with a high benefit and low risk judgment would engage in excreta management practices regardless of the actual risks involved. This finding is relevant for risk communication and risk management as it indicates that individuals do not rely only on risk management information they receive concerning excreta and related risks but also depend to an extent on their feelings about these substances when making judgments and decisions regarding the purpose for using excreta as fertilizer and the level of exposure they can tolerate and manage.

Policies aiming at promoting entrepreneurship are in general formed on national levels, without any consideration of differences between urban and rural areas. Usually, cities are provided with better and more modern infrastructure; cities have better supply of physical, financial and human capital, and connected services, and cities have a more modern industrial structure in the sense that their shares of growing industry are higher. Thus, it is possible that policies for entrepreneurship, which in general are designed for urban areas, might be less effective when they are implemented in rural areas. A first step to test the validity of this hypothesis could be to investigate the differences between cities and countryside regarding self-employment propensity and factors affecting the choice to become self-employed. Based on an exceptionally rich data set containing very detailed socio-economic and geographical information on all residents in Sweden, this paper examines: (a) the scope and structure of self-employment propensity in urban and rural areas, respectively, in Sweden, divided into full-time and part-time self-employment, and (b) the importance of a number of attributes that may have an impact on individuals' propensity to start an enterprise in the two area types. Variables being tested are connected to demography and education, labor market status, plant characteristics, self-employment experience, financial resources, family links and regional attributes. The main results indicate that self-employment entry is influenced by the same factors in the same way in urban and rural areas. However, countryside's industrial structure has a smaller share of growing industries. The fact that countryside's startups follow the existing industrial structure means that this "modernity gap" between densely built up areas and countryside remains. From a policy perspective, this must be seen as a serious problem for countryside's growth potential. This gives an argument for designing a special entrepreneurship policy for the countryside in order to increase its share of growing trades and thereby modernize its industrial structure.

Across most of Europe, the countryside seems to show a polarized development in which large districts are depopulating, while certain areas, mainly around big- and mid-sized cities, are increasing in population. The latter development is often described in concepts of “rural gentrification” and “rurbanization”, symbolizing a transformation of rural communities to communities with urban values and lifestyles. Most studies of the effects of these processes have focused on social and cultural consequences, as e.g. the displacements of lower-income households with higher-income residents and of rural culture and values with urban ones. This paper examines the phenomenon from another perspective, namely the effects of the “rurbanization” processes on countryside’s labour markets and economic life. This paper aims at analysing the determinants of net migration to rural areas in general and to different types of regions, and the impacts of inmigration on rural labour markets, self-employment and other socio-economic conditions in Sweden for the period of 2003–2005. We find that net migration into rural areas increases with the size of adjacent local and regional centres, whereas net migration decreases with the average commuting distance of workers in the rural areas. When comparing in-migrants to rural areas with rural area stayers, our results indicate that the former has lower incomes, a lower employment ratio and a lower degree of entrepreneurial activities. These differences could—at least partly—be explained by the fact that rural area stayers were on average 6 years older than rural area inmigrants, i.e. the two groups were in different stages of their life cycles.

Denna studie handlar om framtiden för Borås. Den gör det för att dess tema gäller högskolans roll som en central komponent i en kunskapsproducerande ekonomi med global räckvidd. I studien analyseras hur kunskap sprids från utbildnings- och forskningsverksamheten vid Högskolan i Borås till det omgivande samhället samt betydelsen av olika kunskapsspridningsmekaismer. Syftet är att öka förståelsen av högskolans roll för kompetensförsörjning, forskning och samverkan i en regional kontext. Studiens bakgrund är ett tilltagande behov att förstå och förklara hur kunskap sprids och spiller över från universitet och högskolor samt den långsiktiga betydelsen av högre lärosäten för kompetensförsörjning och regional utveckling. För planerare och beslutsfattare kan studien ligga till grund för diskussioner och planeringsarbete om hur främja högskolans roll som motor i en kunskapsdriven ekonomi.En slutsats av den förhållandevis omfattande genomgång som studien görs av utbildning, forskning och samverkan vid Högskolan i Borås är att högskolan uppvisar förhållanden som liknar de som gäller vid andra regionala högskolor i landet. Studenterna sätter sin prägel på stads- och kulturliv. Högskolan framstår som väl etablerad på sin ort. Detta lägger en grund för ekonomisk tillväxt och utveckling. Man behöver dock förbättra det strategiska arbetet med att få fler att stanna kvar, inte minst bland dem med utbildning och kunskap utanför välfärdsrelaterade yrken. Bland dem med utbildning och kunskap typisk inom innovationsrelaterat arbete samt teknisk forskning och utveckling är det relativt få som stannar kvar. För att få studenterna att stanna kvar efter avslutad måste förutsättningarna stärkas för karriärer inom yrken med krav på (fördjupad) högskolekompetens.För att detta ska vara möjligt krävs ett långsiktigt och gränsöverskridande arbete som involverar högskolan, företag, entreprenörer och offentliga arbetsgivare samt planerare och beslutsfattare på lokal, regional och nationell nivå. Ett lyckosamt ett exempel på ett sådant arbete är satsningen Smart Textiles. Man behöver dock ett bredare och mer omfattande engagemang. En central fråga i ett sådant arbete är hur långt man kommit i att främja ett närings- och arbetsliv som skapar en kompetensmultiplikator till nytta för den ekonomiska utvecklingen på längre sikt. En annan fråga är hur kunskapsnyttor från forskningsverksamheten vid Högskolan i Borås kan få ännu större spridning och förankring i regionen.För att komma vidare på det spåret behövs en kritisk granskning från universitetsledningen av hur man ska förhålla sig till frågan om konkurrens eller samverkan mellan universiteten i Västra Götaland. Vid strategivalet kring Högskolan i Jönköping eller som lärosätet nu heter Jönköping University har frågan om lokal förankring eller internationell positionering varit av central betydelse. Det ambitiösa valet att satsa på det internationella spåret och göra hela Jönköping University internationellt har inte skett utan motsättningar och svårigheter.

The aim of this explorative study is to investigate the extent the research infrastructure facilities at DESY in Hamburg (Germany) and MAX-lab in Lund (Sweden) serve as research hubs in the Baltic Sea Region, and how different research cooperations related to these facilities are structured. Our purpose is to focus explicitly on cooperations that exist or have existed and proceed to analyze whether there is a functional relationship between researchers and these research facilities within the Baltic Sea Region. The overall objective is to produce an undercoating material to discuss how the Baltic Sea Link can contribute to an improved research and innovation environment in the Baltic Sea Region by promoting cooperation and joint-actions between research institutes and research facilities.

This study investigates factors determining the location of foreign direct investments (FDI) in Sweden. The main purpose is to examine the link between FDI and public incentives, in the form of regional grants, which make up a central part of the Swedish regional policy and state expenditures that explicitly addresses regional development. Our main finding is that there is no evidence of a robust relationship between grants and the location of FDI. However, a statistically significant effect is found for investment support and transport allowance, which are grants that aims at promoting development in designated areas. This by supporting investments in machines, buildings, and so on, and offset costs disadvantages in the northern parts of the country. We conclude that a better integration between the work on FDI and regional development may be a plausible route to promote economic development in Sweden, particularly in deprived regions.

Having gone from 11.8% of its population inhabiting urban areas in 1950 to 49.2% by 2010, China represents the most dramatic urban transformation the world has seen. With the contemporary urban narrative presenting new challenges, particularly in terms of its unprecedented pace and scale, this paper conducts an inquiry into the nature and causes of China’s rapid urban ascent. Making use of a new analytical framework, this paper maps out the changing stages of China’s urban transition and examines the components of urban growth underpinning it. It arrives at several notable findings. Rural to urban migration has been the dominant component of urban growth, followed by urban natural population increase and reclassification. Although China’s urban growth rates were high, it is the reduction in rural growth rates that underpinned China’s particularly rapid urbanization rates. China is currently in the latter part of the accelerated stage of its urban transition, and is expected to enter the terminal stage by 2030. In light of China’s ongoing urban transition, this paper concludes with reflections on China’s New-Type Urbanization Plan 2014–2020.

This paper investigates the relationship between overall inequality in China and the contributions of physical capital, human capital and social capital. The investment in physical capital tends to enlarge overall inequality while human capital helps to reduce the inequality. Human capital appears to be more influential than physical capital in overall inequality reduction in the research period. Social capital (people's social networks) however, does not seem to exert any impact on overall inequality in the post-reform era. Possible policy implications of these results are that measures should be taken to pursue more even distributed investment of physical capital and to increase people's education in order to reduce overall inequality in China.

The paper aims to investigate land conversion as a result of urban-rural transformation in the Chinese context. Theoretical analysis and empirical study of the Bohai Rim region find strong connections between the land conversion rates and urban-rural transformation intensity in the period 2000-2010. Rapid land conversion normally takes place in counties/districts of low initial level of urban-rural transformation. However, places of high initial socioeconomic level and low transformation intensity would experience slow land conversion. The different land conversion rates in relation to urban-rural transformation intensity are mainly attributed to the China's land quotas distribution system which is subjective and administrative. The study highlights the implementation of land quotas distribution system based on differences to improve the land distribution efficiency and achieve balanced regional development in China.

This paper examines the roles of physical capital, human capital, and social capital in China’s economic growth during the reform period 1981–2010. Empirical estimation confirms that physical capital and human capital contribute to the economic growth, probably due to the capital accumulation and the improvement of labor productivity. The impact of social capital turns from being insignificant in the 1980s and the 1990s to be positive in the 2000s, suggesting its rising importance in recent decades. A declining role of physical capital in the economic growth in China from 1990s to 2000s is also found. The findings hold for several additional robustness checks, including focusing on longer term determinants of the economic growth, subregional analysis, and endogeneity. Furthermore, the foreign direct investment inflows and adjustment of economic ownership structure are also important for economic growth in China

This paper provides two scenarios of population change and its spatial distribution at the county level in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan Region: three residential patterns and three population growth groups. The findings show that population change in this region mainly agglomerated to the urban districts and areas of fast population growth in the period of 1990-2000. Regression results also provide details on the contribution of a number of determinants to the population change in the divisions of each scenario. This research concludes by arguing the necessity of future population studies in terms of different regional or local conditions.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make a general comparison between urban-rural relationship in China and that in the developed countries, aiming to draw some experiences based on which future tendencies of urban-rural relationship in China could be predicted.

Design/methodology/approach – The core analysis of this paper examines how the urban-rural relationship develops especially when urbanization rate reaches a very high level. Through literature review, this paper explores the evolution of urban-rural relationship in developed nations by referring to some international cities in different industrial stages. In parallel, it goes through this relationship in China from 1949 until now.

Findings – This paper shows that future urbanization development in China will be generated largely by rural-urban migration especially the eastern-inclined migration while rural industrialization-lead urbanization would develop at the provincial level. It also points that education and training to the labor force is the crucial issue to future urbanization development in China.

Originality/value – The obvious value of this paper is to predict, through a historical review and comparison, urban-rural relationship in China when it is approaching to high urbanization level. Literature review finds some experiences in developed countries that will somehow take place in China. It also analyzes the eastern-oriented rural-urban migration, rural industrialization and their influence on urban-rural relationship in China.

It is necessary for rural communities to meet conditions of decline, including depopulation, with effective strategies for rural revival and revitalisation. Based on Hirschman's 'exit-voice' theory, this paper investigates the way in which local stakeholders respond to processes of rural depopulation. Case studies undertaken in Xiaoguan village in China and in Are in Sweden reveal the effectiveness of bottom-up revitalization initiatives in combating rural decline. We show how local stakeholders' strong "voices" in these places which called for improved living conditions and increased job opportunities held people and groups together, encouraging them to work together with shared values and attitude. The strong leadership demonstrated either by local committees or in stakeholders' self-organized actions played an important role in carrying out revitalisation initiatives. We highlight the importance of not only reviving economies but also creating desirable rural lifestyles. Our findings also emphasize the need for bottom-up initiatives to align with government policy and regional development plans.

In the networked information and knowledge-based economy and society, the notions of ‘open’ and ‘openness’ are used in a variety of contexts; open source, open access, open economy, open government, open innovation – just to name a few. This paper aims at discussing openness and developing a taxonomy that may be used to analyse the concept of openness. Are there different qualities of openness? How are these qualities interrelated? What analytical tools may be used to understand openness? In this paper four qualities of openness recurrent in literature and debate are explored: accessibility, transparency, participation and sharing. To further analyse openness new institutional theory as interpreted by Williamson (2000) is used, encompassing four different institutional levels; cultural embeddedness, institutional environment, governance structure and resource allocations. At what institutional levels is openness supported and/or constrained?Accessibility as a quality of openness seems to have a particularly strong relation to the other qualities of openness, whereas the notions of sharing and collaborative economics seem to be the most complex and contested quality of openness in the knowledge-based economy. This research contributes to academia, policy and governance, as handling of challenges with regard to openness vs. closure in different contexts, territorial, institutional and/or organizational, demand not only a better understanding of the concept, but also tools for analysis.

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. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Our understanding of the relationship between innovative capacity, social ca-pital and the social dimension of sustainable development is still in its infan-cy. There is an extensive literature on innovation with a strong connection to theories of social capital, but only a few studies have examined the effects of social capital on innovation. We create and test two measurable variables that describe local innovative potential in order to contribute to deeper understan-ding of the link between innovation and social capital: business-related social capital related to place, and innovative policy potential in local communities. Our model for Swedish municipalities indicates that these two variables have a positive impact on firm innovation (measured by export value per capita) at the local level, but also that there may be differences between these relationships in urban and rural municipalities.

This volume contains the examined and selected papers of the 8th International Workshop on "Social Capital and Development Trends in Japan's and Sweden's Countryside".

In the current knowledge economy, the most important production factor, human knowledge, is much more mobile than the dominating production factors of previous periods. This means that theories of spatial development, formulated during the manufacturing-industrial era, might not be wholly applicable today. One of the basic assumptions of spatial theory is formulated in Waldo Tobler's first law of geography: "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." This article discusses the validity of this law in today's knowledge economy. While several factors have made distance less important, a crucial factor for innovation and growth-tacit knowledge-is still highly dependent on face-to-face contacts. This suggests that Waldo Tobler's first law of geography plays an important role also in the knowledge economy.

This study focuses on the population changes in the countryside and in urban centres within the municipalities of Sweden outside the metropolitan areas, between 1990 and 1997. Overall, the countryside showed a higher population increase than the municipality centres. Smaller population centres suffered a population decline. The increase in population in the countryside was strongest in areas surrounding the metropolises and around regional centres. Statistical analysis showed that population change outside population centres mainly varies with the average income, labour-market access, and taxation values or housing costs in the municipalities. This process of change has run directly counter to the policy that was formulated for small municipalities from the end of the 1960s onwards. The growth in rural population was spontaneous for the most part, and more or less in conflict with the plans of the municipalities.