This study examines migration from Copenhagen and Stockholm's capital city areas (CCA) to rural destinations (2014–2023), focusing on migrant characteristics, COVID-19's impact, and the role of remote work. Utilising longitudinal micro-register data and logistic regression, we analyse counterurbanisation patterns in two Nordic countries sharing cultural similarities but differing markedly in population density and geography. The findings reveal fundamental cross-country differences. Denmark exhibits strong socioeconomic stratification, where highly educated, high-skilled workers avoid rural migration, whilst high earners drive a “wealthy rural exodus” seeking amenity-rich lifestyles. Sweden demonstrates spatial flexibility, with rural migration broadly distributed across social groups, though migration distances increase with workers’ level of education regardless of destination. A key finding is remote work's divergent role as a mobility shock. In Denmark, higher work-from-home (WFH) probability paradoxically reduces CCA-to-rural migration, reinforcing metropolitan attachment, a pattern intensified during the pandemic. Sweden shows the opposite, where remote work gradually expanded the feasible migration radius, with higher WFH probabilities associating with notably longer distances to both rural and urban destinations, particularly post-pandemic. Understanding these dynamics provides crucial insights for policymakers managing population redistribution and sustainable rural development, where remote work increasingly drives residential preferences. Rural municipalities can proactively leverage the counterurbanisation trend, which is driven by desires for improved well-being and affordability, by investing in digital infrastructure and emphasising local amenities such as environmental sustainability, cultural offerings, and social inclusivity to attract and retain new residents.

In this paper, we investigate how the lockdown-induced exposure to remote work affected the likelihood of switching to longer commutes using a longitudinal full-population register of Swedish employees. We find that employees with little experience of longer commutes were more likely to start commuting longer if they had occupations with high potential for remote work. Examining heterogeneity across sectors, this is especially evident among high-skilled workers in sectors with low pre-existing shares of remote work and longer commutes. Our findings are important for understanding regional expansion and spatial extensions of labour markets in a world where more work can be done remotely.

Land system reform is a central component of the structural-economic transformation of rural China. The activation of rural land factors is consistent with urban and rural integration, which requires a balance between factors of land, labor and capital. We develop a theoretical framework of urban-rural factors that incorporates three components: land, labor and capital and estimate the effects of rural homestead transfer (RHT) by comparing three cases of different practices at different rural homestead transfer cases. In the first case, results suggest that rural labor can only choose emigration due to non-existing local industries. In the second case, the off-site replacement was successful with the optimal allocation and reorganization of land and industries. Nevertheless, the improvement of household living standard and comprehensive rural revitalization was insufficient. In the third case, the reform has achieved local industrialization and urbanization at “low level”. The land factor and the labor force were well integrated, resulting in return migration and livelihood diversification forms. the activation of land factors, return migrations of the rural labor and industrialization are critical factors for rural economic development. The promotion of coordinated development of these factors can positively affect household living standards and rural revitalization. This highlights the importance of place-oriented development strategies for comprehensive rural revitalization through the reform process.

Due to, for example, disturbing sound and deteriorated scenery, wind turbines might constitute a negative externality. By using a revealed preference method, we examine the impact of onshore wind turbines on property values in Sweden, analysing over 600,000 real estate transactions from 2005 to 2018. We find that wind turbines are built in areas with lower prices in general (as they are built outside population centres), that property values start declining when a building process is started (due to anticipations of negative impacts) and that the price decline continues after the wind turbine has been commissioned (due to the perceived negative effects). Property values within 2 km of wind turbines decrease by approximately 10-15 %, diminishing the effect to zero beyond 6-10 km. There are significant differences in capitalizsation between regions, with higher capitalisation effects in southern Sweden. These findings suggest the need for policies to internalise external costs and compensate affected property owners, contributing to informed planning for sustainable energy development.

In the context of China's legislation of "ecological civilization", concepts like "ecology", "green" and "low carbon" have become basic requirements for all urban construction projects by the Chinese government. The construction of most new eco-cities is led by local governments. Because of their large scale, long construction period and the investment required, many new eco-cities lack strong financial support from local governments and have to rely on private enterprises. Local governments have shifted the task of solving the environmental problems of the new eco-cities, which are necessary to achieve ecological goals, to private enterprises. Based on the requirements of national policies and the economic interests of private enterprises, these private enterprises had to deal with the contradiction between environmental challenges and economic interests in the early planning stage of new eco-cities. There is relatively little research on private enterprise-led new eco-cities, and there are no suitable working approaches to help private enterprises resolve this contradiction. This paper takes a new eco-city, Zhongshan New City of the developer company China Fortune Land Development (CFLD), as the research object, proposes an Ideal Collaboration Model with the theoretical support of social capital theory. Then, the model is modified by comparing it with the actions of stakeholders in solving environmental problems in practice. The findings show that the modified ideal model can be used as a working approach for solving complex problems, to perfect the process of eco-planning and to facilitate the collaboration of various stakeholders in order to reduce the environmental damage caused by the development of new cities and to avoid future economic losses for the developers. However, public participation seems hard to realize in the early planning stages of the development of new eco-cities.

The scientific objective of this study is to analyse and compare the convergence, divergence, or stagnation of selected regional labour markets indicators in the European Union, employing beta and sigma convergence concepts and the convergence club approach. By analysing seven labour market indicators from the Regional Competitiveness Index, we uncover a complex and heterogeneous landscape of labour market dynamics. Significant beta convergence is observed in three of the seven indicators, while the remaining four display stagnation. However, sigma convergence is not detected in any of the indicators; instead, two show divergence and five exhibit stagnation. Recognizing that these mixed results may stem from the fact that regions belong to distinct “convergence clubs” shaped by path dependency, we separately analyse post-socialist and capitalist regions. The convergence club approach proves useful in interpreting these varied patterns of convergence, divergence and stagnation in EU regional labour markets. Our findings suggest that while certain regions are converging on specific labour market indicators (e.g. gender balance in unemployment, long-term unemployment), others, particularly in terms of overall unemployment rates and labour productivity, are diverging. This underscores the high degree of heterogeneity within EU regional labour markets, driven by structural, institutional and historical factors. The study highlights that labour market convergence is not an automatic process but one that necessitates strategic, long-term interventions. Policy responses must be tailored and sensitive to the unique circumstances and historical trajectories of each region, aiming not only to reduce immediate disparities but to foster sustainable development that aligns with the overarching goals of economic convergence across the European Union.

Internet access in China has sharply increased, but the potential effect of internet access on rural households’ income and inequality in developing countries could be more complex. To fill in this gap, this study uses data from the China Family Panel Survey in 2014, 2016 and 2018 to examine the impact of internet access on rural households’ income. Ordinary least squares and instrument variable regression results reveal that internet access is correlated with increasing rural households’ income, and this effect among wealthy rural households is smaller than that among poor households. The mechanism analysis reveals that internet access increases labour supply and the probability of working in secondary industry. In addition, internet access changes rural residents’ subjective assessment of employment and social security, and internet access related to learning, working, social interaction, entertainment and business positively affects income. Furthermore, internet access has a larger effect for small families. Finally, the impact of internet access does not change across regional disparities. Our findings indicate that improving rural internet infrastructure, reducing the cost of internet usage and guiding rural households to use the internet can help enhance internet access among rural households, subsequently increasing households’ income.

What contributes to innovation quantity and quality in a given geographic space? This paper provides a novel perspective by exploring the effect of civil organizations. A straightforward framework is constructed to understand the institutional context of government behaviors in China. Using regional data from 2010 to 2022, this paper discovers that civil organizations positively correlated with innovation output. Notably, Olson organizations prove to be more predictive of patent output compared to Putnam organizations. Moreover, significant impacts are observed in the domain of low-quality patents, such as utility models and design patents. Additionally, Olson organizations exhibit a positive impact on green innovation. With firm-level data, this paper finds limited evidence supporting the role of local exchange of ideas and knowledge. The promoting effect of civil organizations on innovation appears to stem from the "favor exchange mechanism" rather than the "knowledge sharing mechanism."

In line with the emergence of the post-urban world, a general development trend is that rural areas are being divided into two opposite parts: the city-close countryside, which is being integrated into the growing city-regions, and a peripheral countryside outside the growth influences of the city-regions. (Between these areas, there might be intermediate zones interacting with the city-regions, but not enough to transition fully into integration). This means that “rural areas” cannot be treated as one unit, but as two units with very different development tendencies. This chapter discusses the situation and tendencies for these two types of rural areas in Sweden and Slovakia, respectively. Both are members of the European Union, and their rural policies are determined by the Union’s Common Agricultural Policy. However, the countries’ histories and institutional legacies are very different. Postwar Sweden has been a welfare market economy, while Slovakia, after World War II, became a part of the socialist Czechoslovakia and did not become an independent state until 1993. Against this background, this chapter presents and analyzes current challenges for rural development in the two countries, presents and discusses two successful cases of development in the rural peripheries, and, based on these, draws some conclusions on building rural resilience.