Etelä-Karjalan aluebarometri

Tutkimuksen päätavoitteena oli rakentaa Etelä-Karjalan maakunnan alueellinen suhdannebarometri. Aluebarometrilla kuvataan ja analysoidaan alueen toimialojen tuotannon ja työllisyyden kehitystä sekä nykytilannetta tuoreilla, havainnollisilla ja luotettavilla indikaattoreilla. Tutkimusmenetelmänä on konstruktiivinen tutkimus. Aluebarometri toteutettiin kyselytutkimuksena 454:ltä yritykseltä Etelä-Karjalan alueella keväällä 2002. Tulokset on raportoitu toimialoittain sisältäen kyselytutkimuksen 11 indikaattoria sekä kaksi tilastollista muuttujaa. Teoriaosassa tarkasteltiin aluetalouden rakentumista, aluekehitystä, yritysten sijaintiteorioita ja systeemidynamiikkaa. Barometrin konstruoinnin lisäksi empiirisessä osassa analysoitiin maakunnan yritystoiminnan ja toimialarakenteen tyypillisiä piirteitä sekä selvitettiin barometrin käyttäjäkunnan tietotarpeita. Tutkimustulosten mukaan Etelä-Karjalan yritykset odottavat aluebarometrin indikaattoreiden kehittyvän seuraavan kuuden kuukauden ajanjaksolla lievästi myönteiseen suuntaan. Myönteisintä kehitystä odotetaan myynnin ja Venäjän yleisen suhdannetilanteen suhteen. Toimialoista positiivisimmat odotukset ovat informaatioteknologian, liike-elämän palveluiden, muiden palveluiden sekä kaupan aloilla, heikoimmat puolestaan rakentamisen alalla.

Framework for Regional Heating Energy Efficiency Assessment

The aim of this project was to develop general framework for systematic assessment of energy efficiency of heating on regional level in Russia. The framework created during this project includes two main instruments, namely: general regional heating energy efficiency assessment model (REEMod) and general regional heating energy efficiency assessment criteria for housing areas (REECrit). Framework pays extreme attention to realization of energy saving, overall cost efficiency and comfortable indoor climate. Life-cycle ideology was applied during creation of the framework. Application of the framework can provide decision-making process with systematically collected and processed information on current state of areas energy efficiency. Such information will help decision makers to evaluate current situation of the whole energy chain, to compare different development scenarios and to identify the most efficient improvement methods, thus supporting realization of regions efficient energy management. Simultaneous pursuit of energy savings, cost efficiency and indoor air quality can contribute to development of sustainable community. Presented instruments should be continuously developed further as an iterative process based on knew experience, development of technology and overall understanding of energy efficiency issues.

Distribution and role of macrophytes in coastal lagoons : implications of critical shifts

Crossroads, crucibles and refuges are three words that may describe natural coastal lagoon environments. The words refer to the complex mix of marine and terrestrial influences, prolonged dilution due to the semi-enclosed nature and the function of a habitat for highly diverse plant and animal communities, some of which are endangered. To attain a realistic picture of the present situation, high vulnerability to anthropogenic impact should be added to the description. As the sea floor in coastal lagoons is usually entirely photic, macrophyte primary production is accentuated compared with open sea environments. There is, however, a lack of proper knowledge on the importance of vegetation for the general functioning of coastal lagoon ecosystems. The aim of this thesis is to assess the role of macrophyte diversity, cover and species identity over temporal and spatial scales for lagoon functions, and to determine which steering factors primarily restrict the qualitative and quantitative composition of vegetation in coastal lagoons. The results are linked to patterns of related trophic levels and the indicative potential of vegetation for assessment of general conditions in coastal lagoons is evaluated. This thesis includes five field studies conducted in flads and glo-flads in the brackish water northern Baltic Sea. Flads and glo-flads are defined as a Baltic variety of coastal lagoons, which due to an inlet threshold and post-glacial landuplift slowly will be isolated from the open sea. This process shrinks inlet size, increases exposure and water retention, and is called habitat isolation. The studied coastal lagoons are situated in the archipelago areas of the eastern coast of Sweden, the Åland Islands and the south-west mainland of Finland, where land-uplift amounts to ca. 5 mm/ per year. Out of 400 evaluated sites, a total of 70 lagoons varying in inlet size, archipelago position and anthropogenic influence to cover for essential environmental variation were chosen for further inventory. Vegetation composition, cover and richness were measured together with several hydrographic and morphometric variables in the lagoons both seasonally and inter-annually to cover for general regional, local and temporal patterns influencing lagoon and vegetation development. On smaller species-level scale, the effects of macrophyte species identity and richness for the fish habitat function were studied by examining the influence of plant interaction on juvenile fish diversity. Thus, the active election of plant monoand polycultures by fish and the diversity of fish in the respective culture were examined and related to plant height and water depth. The lagoons and vegetation composition were found to experience a regime shift initiated by increased habitat isolation along with land-uplift. Vegetation composition altered, richness decreased and cover increased forming a less isolated and more isolated regime, named the vascular plant regime and charophyte regime, respectively according to the dominant vegetation. As total phosphorus in the water, turbidity and the impact of regional influences decreased in parallel, the dominance of charophytes and increasing cover seemed to buffer and stabilize conditions in the charophyte regime and indicated an increased functional role of vegetation for the lagoon ecosystem. The regime pattern was unaffected by geographical differences, while strong anthropogenic impact seemed to distort the pattern due to loss of especially Chara tomentosa L. in the charophyte regime. The regimes were further found unperturbed by short-time temporal fluctuations. In fact the seasonal and inter-annual dynamics reinforced the functional difference between the regimes by the increasing role of vegetation along habitat isolation and the resemblance to lake environments for the charophyte regime. For instance, greater total phosphorus and chlorophyll a concentrations in the water in the beginning of the season in the charophyte regime compared with the vascular plant regime presented a steeper reduction to even lower values than in the vascular plant regime along the season. Despite a regional importance and positive relationship of macrophyte diversity in relation to trophic diversity, species identity was underlined in the results of this thesis, especially with decreasing spatial scale. This result was supported partly by the increased role of charophytes in the functioning of the charophyte regime, but even more explicitly by the species-specific preference of juvenile fish for tall macrophyte monocultures. On a smaller species-level scale, tall plant species in monoculture seemed to be able to increase their length, indicating that negative selection forms preferred habitat structures, which increase fish diversity. This negative relationship between plant and fish diversity suggest a shift in diversity patterns among trohic levels on smaller scale. Thus, as diversity patterns seem complex and diverge among spatial scales, it might be ambiguous to extend the understanding of diversity relationships from one trophic level to the other. All together, the regime shift described here presents similarities to the regime development in marine lagoon environments and shallow lakes subjected to nutrient enrichment. However, due to nutrient buffering by vegetation with increased isolation and water retention as a consequence of the inlet threshold, the development seems opposite to the course along an eutrophication gradient described in marine lagoons lacking an inlet threshold, where the role of vegetation decreases. Thus, the results imply devastating consequences of inlet dredging (decreasing isolation) in terms of vegetation loss and nutrient release, and call for increased conservational supervision. Especially the red listed charophytes would suffer negatively from such interference and the consequences are likely to also deteriorate juvenile fish production. The fact that a new species to Finland, Chara connivens Salzm. Ex. Braun 1835 was discovered during this study further indicates a potential of the lagoons serving as refuges for rare species.

The use of future-oriented knowledge in regional innovation processes: Research on knowledge generation, transfer and conversion

The importance of the regional level in research has risen in the last few decades and a vast literature in the fields of, for instance, evolutionary and institutional economics, network theories, innovations and learning systems, as well as sociology, has focused on regional level questions. Recently the policy makers and regional actors have also began to pay increasing attention to the knowledge economy and its needs, in general, and the connectivity and support structures of regional clusters in particular. Nowadays knowledge is generally considered as the most important source of competitive advantage, but even the most specialised forms of knowledge are becoming a short-lived resource for example due to the accelerating pace of technological change. This emphasizes the need of foresight activities in national, regional and organizational levels and the integration of foresight and innovation activities. In regional setting this development sets great challenges especially in those regions having no university and thus usually very limited resources for research activities. Also the research problem of this dissertation is related to the need to better incorporate the information produced by foresight process to facilitate and to be used in regional practice-based innovation processes. This dissertation is a constructive case study the case being Lahti region and a network facilitating innovation policy adopted in that region. Dissertation consists of a summary and five articles and during the research process a construct or a conceptual model for solving this real life problem has been developed. It is also being implemented as part of the network facilitating innovation policy in the Lahti region.

Local and Regional Scale Determinants of Biodiversity Patterns in Boreal Agricultural Landscapes

This thesis examines the local and regional scale determinants of biodiversity patterns using existing species and environmental data. The research focuses on agricultural environments that have experienced rapid declines of biodiversity during past decades. Existing digital databases provide vast opportunities for habitat mapping, predictive mapping of species occurrences and richness and understanding the speciesenvironment relationships. The applicability of these databases depends on the required accuracy and quality of the data needed to answer the landscape ecological and biogeographical questions in hand. Patterns of biodiversity arise from confounded effects of different factors, such as climate, land cover and geographical location. Complementary statistical approaches that can show the relative effects of different factors are needed in biodiversity analyses in addition to classical multivariate models. Better understanding of the key factors underlying the variation in diversity requires the analyses of multiple taxonomic groups from different perspectives, such as richness, occurrence, threat status and population trends. The geographical coincidence of species richness of different taxonomic groups can be rather limited. This implies that multiple geographical regions should be taken into account in order to preserve various groups of species. Boreal agricultural biodiversity and in particular, distribution and richness of threatened species is strongly associated with various grasslands. Further, heterogeneous agricultural landscapes characterized by moderate field size, forest patches and non-crop agricultural habitats enhance the biodiversity of rural environments. From the landscape ecological perspective, the major threats to Finnish agricultural biodiversity are the decline of connected grassland habitat networks, and general homogenization of landscape structure resulting from both intensification and marginalization of agriculture. The maintenance of key habitats, such as meadows and pastures is an essential task in conservation of agricultural biodiversity. Furthermore, a larger landscape context should be incorporated in conservation planning and decision making processes in order to respond to the needs of different species and to maintain heterogeneous rural landscapes and viable agricultural diversity in the future.

Regional potential for collaborative implementation of small CHP plants in bioenergy technology

This thesis is a preliminary study targeting South-Eastern Finland. The objective was to find out the financial and functional readiness and willingness of the small and medium-sized enterprises of the region to manufacture and sell distributed bioenergy solutions collaboratively as a business network. In this case these solutions mean small-scale (0.5 - 3 MW) woodchips-operated combined heat and power (CHP) plants. South-Eastern Finland has suffered from a decline in the recent years, mostly due to the problems of the traditionally strong industrial know-how area of the region, the paper industry. Local small and medium-sized companies will have to find new ways to survive the toughening competition. A group of 40 companies from suitable industries were selected and financial and comparative analysis was performed on them. Additionally 19 managing directors of the companies were selected for an interview to find out their views on networking, its requirements, advantages and the general interest in it. The studied companies were found to be generally in fairly good financial condition and in that sense, fit for networking activities. The interviews revealed that the companies were capable of producing all the needed elements for the plants in question, and the managers appeared to be very interested in and have a positive attitude towards such business networks. Thus it can be said that the small and medium-sized companies of the region are capable of and interested in manufacturing small bio-CHP plants as a production network.

Aligning Regional Repository Networks

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Effects of subsidizing the first employee – Empirical evidence from Finland

Small businesses form a significant share of all businesses and employ a large share of all employees. Therefore, governments are often interested in subsidizing them and especially employment in smaller firms. Nonemployer firms have received special interest, especially in Finland, due to their large share of all businesses. It has been argued that the government should encourage them to hire by subsidizing employment. However, there is no evidence on the effectiveness of such policies. In general, there is surprisingly little evidence on how small firms react to employment subsidies or of employment subsidies targeted according to firm characteristics. The subject of this thesis is the effects of subsidizing the first employee. While theoretical background suggests the subsidy might have efficiency gains, because there might be market inefficiencies that lead to too little employment in small firms. The focus of this research, however, is on the empirical evidence. There was a regional subsidy for hiring the first employee in Finland between 2007 and 2011. Nonemployer firms in the subsidy area were eligible for a wage subsidy for two years when they hired the first employee. The design of the subsidy enables studying the effects in a natural experiment framework that are nowadays popular in public economics. It can be shown that the area without the subsidy provides a good counterfactual to the area where the subsidy was available. Therefore, the effects of the subsidy can be estimated with difference-in-differences method. This method compares the change in the subsidy area to the change in the area without the subsidy. The data used is firm level data spanning from 2000 to 2013. The data is provided by the Finnish Tax Administration including tax declarations by all Finland based companies. The effects for hiring decisions are estimated by examining the effects for alternative variables such as employment, wage expenditure and turnover. According to the results, the subsidy did not have statistically significant effect on any of the variables of interest. Therefore, it can be concluded that the subsidy did not increase hires in nonemployer firms. This implies that the labour demand elasticity of nonemployer firms is very small. The results are in line with previous literature on the effectiveness of general employment subsidies in Scandinavia that suggest that labour demand elasticity is rather small resulting in small or no effects of employment subsidies. However, my research provides new evidence on labour demand of nonemployer firms especially that has not been studied before. The results are in line with the observation that most nonemployer firms are self-employed persons who are not interested in growing their business to employ others as well, but only provide for themselves. Because of this employment subsidies to the self-employed are not particularly well targeted. The theoretical grounds for the subsidy actually hold for other small firms as well, so it can be argued the subsidy would be more effective if it was extended for hiring the first few employees.