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Tourism growth on the national level in Sweden is being concentrated to the three main urban centres. The question is if the same trend is discernible within Swedish regions. If so, tourism as a tool in regional transformation and for alleviating spatial disparities has a weak basis. The strategy to strengthen the competitiveness of each region/local community based on the Tourism Led Growth Hypothesis but is questioned. Urban hierarchy and centrifugal forces are often overlooked. Data on overnight stays between 2008 and 2016 are analysed for four regions in central Sweden: Dalarna, Värmland, Gävleborg, and Jämtland. Results indicate that there is an ongoing concentration to regional urban centres and that destination competitiveness is directly linked to an urban supremacy. Thus, tourism growth is primarily a concern for urban areas and, which contradicts the traditional notions of tourism policy in Sweden, where tourism is regarded as a remedy for declining regions.

Abstract

The tourism sector is growing in importance for the Swedish economy. However this growth is not uniformly distributed within the country and this in turn leads to an uneven distribution of tourism activity between regions as well as between rural and urban areas. In a previous study it is concluded that the growth of bed nights between 2000 and 2010 is concentrated to the three larger urban regions in Sweden. The substantial growth of tourism in Sweden is therefore mainly a big city phenomenon, which is in sharp contrast to the picture entertained by policy makers and government officials. Tourism is regarded and promoted as a universally applicable tool when it comes to develop rural areas or regions in need for alternative job opportunities when traditional occupations are phased out. 

This study addresses the question of redistribution within the regions. The question in focus is if the tendency of concentration of bed nights follows the same pattern within the regions as on the national level, i.e. if concentration increases over time. It is also of interest to identify those destinations, which deviate from the main pattern and to scrutinize the how they, achieve sustainable or at least long term competitiveness.

An analysis is based on data collected by statistics Sweden and the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth. Data on overnight stays in commercial establishments were derived on local level between 2008 and 2016 for four regions in central Sweden; Dalarna, Värmland, Gävleborg and Jämtland. This data set makes it possible to make a longitudinal (annual) analysis of the redistribution of bed nights in detail. The concentration was analysed based on a calculation of the locational quotient and the corresponding locational coefficient, which relates concentration of tourism to that of the population on municipal level.

A preliminary analysis of the data indicates a similar pattern as on the national level; i.e. there is a strong on-going concentration to regional urban centres indicating the presence of an urban supremacy. In other words, tourism growth is primarily a concern for urban areas rather than it being beneficial to rural development. This result contradicts the traditional notions in Sweden where tourism is regarded as a saviour for declining regions.

This article investigates the relationship between technology and narrative in digital guides for tourists in Sweden. The main finding shows that narratives in the guides are based on a naïve view of history. In several instances, content is based on odd stories and speculation. Recent social trends have led to the erosion of grand narratives and the emergence of multiple views of history. New digital guides must address these challenges in order to develop tourism products that are relevant to different market segments.

In the contemporary competition state, many peripheral regions are in decline. Tourism is increasingly considered as a savior for regions lagging behind. The EU has launched several programs with the ambition to stimulate growth and employment in peripheral areas which are used in tourism development projects. In this paper a longitudinal analysis of changes in Swedish tourism guest nights with an attempt to assess the spatial changes that have taken place in the light of this new regional tourism policy are carried out. The aim is to investigate if tourism and tourism policy contributes to level out disparities between regions. The analysis is based on statistics on Swedish guest nights, on employees in the accommodation sector and on EU funds. Although there are exceptions, the main findings indicate that the potential for creating sustainable rural tourism growth through tourism policy seems to be much less than the popular discourse suggests.

In this article, the development and changes in Swedish public policy relating to tourism from the 1930s to 2010 is described and interpreted from a political economy perspective. A case study, compiled from mainly secondary sources, is analyzed from a theoretical framework based on regulation theory. The purpose with this study is to increase the understanding of how the macro political economy context has influenced the policy-making in tourism in Sweden, but also to make a contribution to an area which seems to be quite neglected when it comes to research. The changes are analyzed according to the three periods denoted as pre-Fordism (mid-19^th century-1930s), Fordism (1930s-1970s) and post-Fordism (1970s to present). It is observed how the general changes between these periods regarding aspects such as regulation and deregulation, and the degree of state involvement, have affected tourism policy making. The tourism policy making has changed from being insignificant, to a high degree of state involvement including planning, control and supervision, to a situation where the market rather than government regulation is considered as state of the art. 

This paper aims to analyze the GPS traces of 258 volunteers for a better understanding of both the human mobility patterns and the mechanism. We report the regular and scaling properties of human mobility from several aspects, and importantly we find its levy flight characteristic which is consistent with the previous studies. We further assume two factors that may govern the levy flight property: (1) the scaling and hierarchical properties of the purpose clusters which serve as the underlying spatial structure, and (2) the individual preferential behavior. To verify the assumptions, we implement an agent-based model with the two factors, and the simulated agents indeed reproduce the same levy flight pattern as the observed one. In order to enable the model to reproduce more mobility patterns, we add the model a third factor, the jumping factor which means the probability that one person may cancel the regular mobility schedule and visit a random place. With this factor, our model could cover a relatively wide range of human mobility patterns with exponent values from 1.55 to 2.05.

Studien föranleds av den nya konkurrenslagstiftningen som påverkar gränsdragningen mellan privat och offentligt engagemang inom turismen. I studien görs ett försök att förstå den historiska utvecklingen utifrån institutionell teori. Att över tid följa hur turismen från att ha legat utanför samhällets intressesfär till att i allt högre grad inkluderas i och bli föremål för samhällsåtaganden till att i betydande utsträckning åter överflyttas till den privata sfären blir enligt författarnas mening begripligare om förändringsförloppet förstås i den referensram som den institutionella teorin erbjuder. Den pendelrörelse som på detta sätt kan urskiljas beträffande gränsdragningen mellan privat och offentligt är också en del i hur man skall förstå hur synen på konkurrensbetingelser inte är statisk utan i hög grad konstruerad och framförhandlad från tid till annan. Men det som gälller tid tycks också ha en geografisk dimension där vad som anses tillåtet i en del av landet inte uppfattas så på ett annat ställe. Det som uppfattas som ett juridiskt spörsmål i förstone vilar i realiteten i en komplex kontext med ingredienser av historia, ekonomi och geografi.