Promoting rural municipalities to attract new residents: an evaluation of the effects

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s, most rural municipalities in Sweden experienced population declines and were forced to face the constraints of an ageing population. To counter this development a significant share turned to place marketing campaigns and promotion in the hope of attracting new residents. This paper examines the campaign efforts of the Swedish rural municipalities and addresses the question of whether they have been successful. The main methodological approach used in the paper is the employment of a pooled regression analysis (i.e. a combination of time series and cross-sectional data) to study the effects of marketing campaigns on migration flows to rural municipalities while simultaneously controlling for other potentially influential factors. Moreover, a case study is carried out in one municipality by way of interviews and detailed descriptive analysis of migration data. The results suggest no general evidence for a positive effect of marketing campaigns on in-migration, but in a few cases a positive impact cannot be ruled out conclusively