The Approach to Seasonal Unemployment in the Nordic Countries: A Comparison with Canada

This paper compares policies with respect to seasonal unemployment in the five Nordic countries with Canada. A key finding of this study is that unlike Canada Nordic countries do notspecifically address seasonal employment. Another was that in spite of the weather fluctuations in seasonal unemployment were much less pronounced than in Canada. This paper reviews the labour market policies in the Nordic countries that contributed to lower levels of seasonal unemployment.Seasonal unemployment; labour market policies; Nordic countries; Canada

Research communication

In this paper we review briefly histories and ideologies underlying multiculturalism in Nordic countries, highlighting tensions between integrationist and inclusive approaches. We propose a cultural ecological framework through which we discuss the possibility of a transculturalism based on Fourth World engagement with the environment. Cultural ecology is about the reciprocal interactions and transactions between people and their environments. The Fourth World is a circum-global, pan-arctic region which includes the northern parts of some Nordic countries. We argue that whether or not there is a distinctively Nordic version of multiculturalism, Nordic countries have access to Fourth World ways of engaging with the environment which transcend notions of inter- and multiculturalism and the ideological tensions associated with them

Generational Accounting in Nordic Countries

On February 23, 2001 a workshop on «Generational Accounting in the Nordic Countries» was held in Reykjavik, Iceland, arranged jointly by the Institute of Economic Studies at the University of Iceland and the Ministry of Finance in Norway. This paper describes the main ideas in generational accounting, and gives an overview of results from the papers presented in the workshop. Finally, it sums up some important lessons and remaining challenges in generational accounting and for the sustainability of fiscal policy.

Productivity and International Firm Activities: What Do We Know?

This paper summarizes in a non-technical way what we know from empirical studies based on firm-level data about the mutual links between international activities of firms and productivity. It is written with a view to inform policy makers in an evidence-based way. A special focus is on the empirical evidence we have from studies using firm-level data from the Nordic countries. It is argued that this empirical evidence does not provide a sound basis to search for similarities and differences (and their causes) between the Nordic countries, and the empirical results reported cannot qualify as stylized facts that can inform policy makers in an evidence-based way.international firm activities, productivity, firm level data, Nordic countries

Marital sorting, household labour supply, and intergenerational mobility across countries

We present comparable evidence on intergenerational earnings mobility for Denmark, Finland, Norway, the UK and the US, with a focus on the role of gender and marital status. We confirm that earnings mobility in the Nordic countries is typically greater than in the US and in the UK, but find that, in contrast to all other groups, for married women mobility is approximately uniform across countries when estimates are based on women's own earnings. Defining offspring outcomes in terms of family earnings, on the other hand, leads to estimates of intergenerational mobility in the Nordic countries which exceed those for the US and the UK for both men and women, single and married. Unlike in the Nordic countries, we find that married women with children and with husbands from affluent backgrounds tend to exhibit reduced labor supply in the US and the UK. In these countries, it is the combination of assortative mating and labor supply responses which weakens the association between married women's own earnings and their parents' earnings

Dating the Turning Points of Nordic Business Cycles.

When were the significant turning points in business activity in the Nordic countries during the last fourty years? How frequent, long, and sharp were the contractions? This paper provides answers to these questions by applying the Bry and Boschan (1971) algorithms, which have been used to analyze business cycle turns in several countries, in particular the United States. Applying the same methods for Nordic countries it is found that contractions were unusually long and frequent in Sweden, while expansions were unusually long in Finland and Norway. However, contractions were not necessarily sharper in Sweden when compared with the other Nordic countries. Surprisingly, not much evidence of a common Nordic cycle is found. It appears instead that Sweden and Denmark tend to mimic the downturns in the G-7 countries more closely than Finland and Norway.

Transnational learning processes: European and Nordic experiences in the employment field

This paper analyses and compares the transnational learning processes in the employment field in the European Union and among the Nordic countries. Based theoretically on a social constructivist model of learning and methodologically on a questionnaire distributed to the relevant participants, a number of hypotheses concerning transnational learning processes are tested. The paper closes with a number of suggestions regarding an optimal institutional setting for facilitating transnational learning processes.Transnational learning, Open Method of Coordination, Learning, Employment, European Employment Strategy, European Union, Nordic countries

Automatic dating of medieval charters from Denmark

Dating of medieval text sources is a central task common to the field of manuscript studies. It is a difficult process requiring expert philological and historical knowledge. We investigate the issue of automatic dating of a collection of about 300 charters from medieval Denmark, in particular how n-gram models based on different transcription levels of the charters can be used to assign the manuscripts to a specific temporal interval. We frame the problem as a classification task by dividing the period into bins of 50 years and using these as classes in a supervised learning setting to develop SVM classifiers. We show that the more detailed facsimile transcription, which captures palaeographic characteristics of a text, provides better results than the diplomatic level, where such distinctions are normalised. Furthermore, both character and word n-grams show promising results, the highest accuracy reaching 74.96 %. This level of classification accuracy corresponds to being able to date almost 75 % of the charters with a 25-year error margin, which philologists use as a standard of the precision with which medieval texts can be dated manually.peer-reviewe

Electricity industry reforms in smaller EU countries: experience from the Nordic region

This report reviews reforms to the electricity sector in the Nordic countries, explains the apparent success so far and explores whether this success can be sustained

Weed problems in various tillage systems in the Nordic countries

There is an increasing use of various forms of reduced tillage or no-tillage in the Nordic countries. This will favour the growth of grass weed species and perennial species. Perennial creeping weeds like Elymus repens, Cirsium arvense, and Sonchus arvensis are important in all Nordic countries. Stationary weeds such as Taraxacum spp., Artemisia vulgaris and volunteer grassland species increase in areas with reduced tillage and especially no-tillage systems. Winter annual and biennial species such as Matricaria perforata, Poa annua, Alopecurus geniculatus and Stellaria media are frequently occuring weeds in reduced tillage systems in all countries, while Alopecurus myosuroides and Apera spica-venti are problems in Denmark and Southern parts of Sweden and Finland