Lars Christian Bruno

Scandinavian Economic History Review p. 1-19 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2025.2545894

Scandinavian Economic History Review Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2022.2032318

This study examines Nordic economic convergence from the sixteenth to twentieth century respective of the economic leaders, in effect the UK before 1914 and USA thereafter. The paper uses a novel approach of combining the analysis of both GDP and wages. The examination of real GDP per capita suggests that there was a catch-up process in play, both with the economic leaders and among the Nordic states, from the early nineteenth century onwards. However, the examination of the adjusted silver wages suggests convergence among the Nordic economies by the end of the eighteenth century. Therefore, we argue, no single Nordic Model emerged from these development patterns, even though the Nordic states today do have striking similarities. Furthermore, they diverged from the West European growth path until the twentieth century, thus they were a part of the Little Divergence at Europe’s other peripheries. The world wars and other crises delayed the full impacts of the convergence process until the latter part of the twentieth century.

Scottish Journal of Political Economy Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/sjpe.12304

This paper explores the effect of market concentration of the Norwegian oil production sector (NPS) on Norway's second- largest industry, the oilfield services companies (OFS). To capture this effect, we use the system generalized method of moments approach (GMM) to estimate an em-pirical model, spanning the period 1993– 2013. The findings indicate that increased market concentration is consistent with lower profitability of the oilfield services companies, as the bargaining power of oil companies relative to service companies increases. Increased knowledge about this effect could contribute to improving strategies for the further de-velopment of these industries by stakeholders

Scandinavian Economic History Review 71(1) Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/03585522.2021.1984298

This paper aims to bridge part of the gap that exists between the resource curse literature and economic historical research on natural resources by analysing four resource-abundant countries. The study proposes that at the sectoral level, the determinants of growth in resource-based industries were mostly similar in the late 19th and late 20th centuries. However, we also argue that the relative contribution of natural resources to economic growth might have been declining during the late twentieth century. The evidence comes from an analysis of the forestry sector in Finland and Sweden between 1860 and 1910 and the palm oil industry in Indonesia and Malaysia between 1970 and 2016.

Economic History of Developing Regions 32(3) p. 221-269 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2017.1343660

The Malaysian palm oil sector is an example of how a developing country can manage to establish itself as a world leader in the production and processing of an agricultural crop. This paper examines the formative period (1970–1990) of the Malaysian palm oil industry by focusing on the productivity at the plantation level, the first level of production, to understand how this process influenced the establishment of the higher value-added refineries. The paper finds that the official productivity figures, the oil yield (metric tonnes of crude palm oil per hectare), is inconsistent and estimates more consistent productivity figures. In addition, the paper briefly considers labour productivity as the Malaysian palm oil sector is more labour-intensive than its competitors. The main finding is that the improvements in plantation productivity were crucial for the development of the palm oil processing refinery sector, which might hold important implications for other developing countries wishing to promote agricultural processing industries.

Institutt for samfunnsøkonomi

This short paper uses recent estimates of GDP per capita for the Baltic countries for the 1919-2020(22) period to test for convergence between the Baltic and the Nordic economies. Drawing from the methodology used in Bernard and Durlauf (1996) and Greasley and Oxley (1997), we utilise a time-series approach to test for bivariate convergence between the various Baltic and Nordic economies. We find some evidence of conditional convergence and catching up for the interwar period, 1919-1939 and the post-Soviet era 1993-2022, when for the communist growth period until 1988 we find no trace of convergence, when thereafter during the last years of communism, the Baltic economies went into a severe and devastating recession.

XIX World Economy History Congress

Baltic Connections 2022

1st Annual Conference of the Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social History

44th Annual Economic and Business History Society Conference