Economics seminar: Job creation in the Blue Economy

Alexandra Allard, PhD student in economics at Södertörn University and Örebro University will present a first draft of her paper “Job creation in the Blue Economy”.

In recent years there has been an increasing focus on maritime sustainability and maritime strategies, such as the EU’s Sustainable Blue Economy approach. Through the transformation of established maritime sectors as well as the development and growth of emerging sectors, it is predicted that maritime sectors will experience increases in employment growth, with the potential to outperform non-maritime sectors.

This study examines job creation in the blue economy, compared with non-blue sectors. Here, the blue economy is defined as sectoral and cross-sectoral economic activities related to maritime resources, with the assumption that these sectors are moving towards more sustainable practices. The focus is on established maritime sectors, such as maritime transport, coastal tourism, and fishing. This is done using corporate data from 1998 to 2020 from the Swedish House of Finance’s Serrano database combined with data for firms within maritime technology and maritime transportation from the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) and Swedish Maritime Technology Forum (SMTF).