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ABSTRACT Policy makers and scholars often regard the life science industry in general, and bio-technology in particular, as an engine of future economic growth. The expectation is that growth in the industry will ultimately provide a major boost to national employment numbers. However, in this paper, I find that the Swedish life science industry (encompassing pharmaceutical, bio-technology, and medical technology firms) accounts for only a small proportion of total employment in Sweden. Given the recent discussion on jobless growth (i.e., economic growth without employment growth), it is here argued that focusing on employment is not necessarily the best policy approach to assessing the impacts of the life science industry on the overall economy. This paper maps and analyses the scope, structure, and geography of the life science industry and its workforce in Sweden using a unique set of data covering approximately 1,200 firms and 53,000 employees. The industry's workforce has education and income levels significantly higher than national averages, and is heavily concentrated in larger metropolitan areas and major university cities. Despite employing relatively few people and being more or less dependent on the existence and success of a few major pharmaceutical firms, the industry may still have a significant impact on the national economy by engendering high levels of education, income, and export revenues, particularly in specific regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses upon the ways in which characteristics of regions in regards to knowledge sources, communication opportunities, and absorptive capacity influence the development of innovation ideas among existing and potential entrepreneurs. We formulate a model where entrepreneurs or innovating firms introduce new products in a quasi-temporal setting. Market conditions are characterised by monopolistic competition between varieties belonging to the same product group, in which there is entry and exit of varieties. A stochastic process is assumed to generate new innovation ideas as time goes by, and a firm (entrepreneur) who receives such an idea has to transform the idea to an innovation, which in the model is specified as a particular variety combined with a specific destination market. The theoretical model is used as a reference when formulating two regression models, with which we estimate how a set of regional characteristics are associated with the likelihood of innovation ideas across Swedish local labour market regions. In one model, we examine the emergence of new export varieties, and in the second model, we investigate the appearance of new export firms. Results are consistent with the assumption that knowledge and information flows have a positive influence on the frequency of arrival of innovation ideas to firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]