An institutional history of Swedish economics

and 1970s, and still exerted some influence in the early 1990s. In an international context, the role of the discipline of economic history in Sweden is fundamental for understanding the history of heterodox economics in Sweden. In a 2003 paper on the international exposure of economic history in Sweden, Daniel Waldenström (Waldenström 2005:11–12) estimates the size of economic history communities, and concludes that the Swedish community is probably almost as large as the British or US community in absolute numbers, and that the three largest economic history departments in the world are probably located in Sweden. Thus, it is a fair guess that the discipline of economic history have served as a safety valve for economics, and, from the point of view of aspiring researchers discontented with the economics mainstream, as a good alternative career option.

This brings us to the institutional infrastructure of Swedish economics.

economics were added at the Gothenburg School of Economics (1923), IIES at Stockholm University (1962), Umeå (1965), and the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University (1972) (Jonung and Gunarsson 1992:26). Smaller departments with professorships have been established since the 1990s at the new universities in Karlstad, Linköping, Luleå, Linnéuniversitetet, and Örebro. The total number of professors rose above 25 only in the late 1980s, most of them in the Stockholm area (Jonung and Gunarsson 1992:26). During the 1980s, there was a new wave of chairs established as external funding opportunities increased. From 1993 the hiring procedure was deregulated and devolved to the university whereas it had previously rested on government decisions. This also contributed to an increasing number of professors being hired, reaching a total of 57 in 1996 (Sandelin 2000:60).

The institutional development of economics in Sweden to today’s internationally-oriented discipline has been a long process, involving a shifting language of sources and publications, research publication formats and outlets, and not least a slow and lagging transformation of doctoral programmes towards the US model. Despite a 1968 reform of doctoral programmes, the 1992 evaluation of Swedish economics found that Sweden lacked proper US-style doctoral programmes, and identified addressing this as an urgent recommendation (Wadensjö 1992). Compared to the United States, several features were found to be lacking in Swedish economics, namely, “a common Ph.D. programme, a common professional organisation like the American Economic Association with its prestigious journals, and a common ‘paradigm’”

(Jonung and Gunarsson 1992:38). This last feature is somewhat surprising, given that most commenters talk explicitly of a common framework or paradigm that became established during this time. This statement should be read in the context of a comparison with an ideal of US economics, and we can then understand the authors’ sense of a lack of common paradigm in comparison with the United States. The authors also note a clear convergence, where US academic values and standards are taking over, and an older tradition of writing monograph dissertations and other publications in Swedish is fading away:

The emphasis is now on the rigorous application of mathematical and statistical techniques. Doctoral candidates aiming at an academic career write their theses in English, attempting to build upon the latest international results. In this way the corps of Swedish economists is becoming professional to an extent unmatched before. There are signs that the skills and knowledge of a good Swedish economics Ph.D. are slowly converging with those of a Ph.D. from a good American department. (Jonung and Gunarsson 1992:47)

Today, doctoral programmes have come a long way since the 1992 evaluation.

Theses are written as compilations of papers in English, and there are well-structured doctoral programmes; in the Stockholm area these are in the form of a collaboration between different departments, the Stockholm Doctoral Programme in Economics (Nycander and Agell 2005:186). Internationalisation has brought about a strong shift in cited literature, from over 60 per cent of cited works in Swedish dissertations being written in Swedish in the 1940s, to less than 10 per cent in 1990–1995 (Sandelin 2000). However, Sandelin argues that this internationalisation is not linear, but in fact somewhat cyclical, with a very low share (around 20 per cent) of Swedish references in the interwar decades.

Internationalisation has also brought about the mathematisation of economics, as evidenced by the average share of pages of dissertations that contain mathematics and econometrics rising between the 1940s and the 1990s from almost none (1 per cent maths and 0 per cent econometrics) to a considerable proportion (around 30 per cent and 10 per cent) (Sandelin 2000).

Research in economics is conducted at university departments of economics, and at university and non-university research institutes. For a long time, up until the 1990s, there were six university departments: Gothenburg, SSE, Lund, Stockholm University, Uppsala University, and Umeå. There is one academic research centre which stands out. At Stockholm University, the IIES has long been the foremost centre of international-standard economics research. Founded by Gunnar Myrdal in 1962 as a broad research institute, it became an important centre for the reinvigoration and internationalisation of Swedish economics under the leadership of Assar Lindbeck from 1971 (Nycander and Agell 2005).

However, rather than a broad interdisciplinary institute, under Lindbeck the IIES came to be a bridge to Anglo-American economics research, and arguably an central institutional driver for the internationalisation of Swedish economics and the definition of top-quality economics research. In the 1980s, IIES received the largest share among all departments, almost 25 per cent of total Swedish faculty grants or 21 per cent of total funding for economics research (Stenkula and Engwall 1992). Looking at its publication activities, IIES contributed a third of all Swedish articles in international economics journals (indexed by SSCI) in the 1970s and 1980s (Persson, Stern, and Gunnarsson 1992). In a 2003 ranking exercise, top authors and departments in Swedish economics were given a score based on the then-novel and influential ranking system developed by Kalaitzidakis et.al. (Kalaitzidakis et al. 2003). This concluded that the three top authors (Lars E O Svensson, Assar Lindbeck and Torsten Persson) were quite far ahead of others; all were active at the IIES, and the institute stood out clearly as the leading department in terms of this particular scoring system (Lindqvist 2003).

A recent study by economist Anders Björklund examined publications in six top international economics journals by authors with a Swedish address during the twelve-year period 2002–2013 (Björklund 2014). Like the 1992 evaluation, he finds that in international comparisons, Sweden has high productivity in top economic journal articles per capita. Of the 65 identified publications, IIES has produced thirty, or almost 50 per cent of all top publications, followed by SSE (fifteen), and Stockholm University, Uppsala University, the private research institute IFN, and the interdisciplinary institute at Stockholm University, SOFI within the range of five to seven articles. Only one of 65 top publications (from Lund) originate outside what Björklund calls the Stockholm-Uppsala geographical cluster. Björklund furthermore looks at the general orientation of research, and notes that the international trend towards empirical data shown by Hamermesh (2013), is also evident in Swedish research, with a large share of studies using unique empirical data, but where the connection to economic theory is sometimes lacking, while there is also a large share of purely theoretical articles.

However, he concludes that while the general public might think of economics as dealing primarily with macroeconomic cyclical phenomena, this is not really the case: among the 65 top articles, “I actually find it hard to see any product that deals with the problems that were actualised by the economic crisis that started in 2008” (Björklund 2014:17).

In the Swedish system, six universities with economics institutions are amongst the largest and best-established research universities (Henrekson and Waldenström 2011:1151). These are Lund, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Uppsala and Umeå, and the SSE. All have had economics doctoral programmes for over forty years. Beside these, the large university reform of the 1990s granted university status to a number of colleges, some of which have now started doctoral programmes in economics. If these six stand out regarding heritage, the picture shifts somewhat when one looks at their role in producing new generations of economists. Using metrics for contemporary undergraduate and graduate education gives us another measure of the relative size of economics departments.

During the three academic years 2011/2012 through 2013/2014, a total of 2,077 first-cycle bachelor exams in economics were awarded in Sweden. Among these, 73 per cent were awarded by five departments: the SSE and the universities of Stockholm, Uppsala, Gothenburg and Lund, with each producing over 200 bachelors during the period. Sixth according to this measure is the younger University of Linköping with 116 bachelor degrees. Umeå ranks ninth in this measure with only fifty students awarded exams. The master’s degree was recently introduced in the Swedish university system, gradually replacing the older magister degree as part of the Bologna process. During the same three year period both

degrees were rewarded as second-cycle or advanced degrees, totalling 1,583 awarded degrees. Of these, more than 50 per cent were awarded by two departments, at Lund University and the SSE. Together, the five largest departments accounted for 81 per cent of all advanced degrees.

The most important phase in the education system for understanding disciplinary reproduction is arguably the third-cycle doctoral programme.

Doctoral exams are represented in the statistics for calendar years instead of academic years. During the four-year period 2011–2014, a total of 181 doctorates were awarded in economics, of which the five departments produced 80 per cent.

Among these, the SSE awarded 39 PhDs, while Lund only awarded nineteen, ranking fifth on this measure. The sixth, Umeå, awarded nine doctorates during the same period.

These metrics are reflected in the increasingly common international university rankings. For example, in the 2015 QS World University Rankings by Subject, which draw on a wide range of indicators, the big five are the only Swedish economics departments present in the listing, with the SSE ranked 31st, and the remainder in the 50–200 range (QS Stars 2015). This is also in line with the somewhat older but widely recognised rankings of journals and departments by Kalaitzidakis, Mamuneas and Stengos (2003). In their ranking of European economics departments, the picture is only slightly different. Four Swedish departments are found in the top 120, with SSE seventeenth, Stockholm University 24th, Uppsala 43rd, Lund 78th and Umeå 91st, and Gothenburg is left out (Kalaitzidakis et al. 2003).

Even though rankings differ slightly in the different measures, it should be uncontroversial to view the five economics departments (SSE, Stockholm, Uppsala, Gothenburg and Lund) together with IIES as the core six institutions of contemporary Swedish economics. Based this overview they will be considered the key Swedish economics departments for the empirical parts of this study.