The Economic Geography of Culture : A Swedish Perspective

Abstract:

Research continuously highlights creativity’s importance for regional growth. This thesis aims to understand what economic factors that affect the place of culture in Sweden. All of the 290 Swedish municipalities are studied, using occupational data from 2011. Both a weighted least squares regression and an ordinal logit regression are run, in order to study both the concentration and the variety of culture. The main findings are that aver-age income show a significant positive relationship with the place of culture, the con-centration of cultural facilities showed a significant positive relationship with the place of culture, while the share of culture expenditure by local government did not show a significant relationship. Furthermore, the location of culture in 2000 showed significant influence on the location of culture in 2011, but the location of culture in 1990 did not.