Across Europe, environmental performance has improved alongside economic expansion. Since 1990, most EU countries have seen a steady decline in territorial CO2 emissions, improved energy-efficiency, and reductions in pollution, enabled by common instruments such as emissions trading, product regulations, and renewable energy targets. While the broad pattern is visible across member states, some cases demonstrate especially sustained and measurable decoupling. Sweden offers one such example. Between 1990 and 2023, the country reduced territorial CO2 emissions by 38% while GDP more than doubled. Air pollutants fell across nearly all tracked categories, energy intensity declined, and hazardous chemical use decreased despite rising population and output. These outcomes emerged gradually—not through disruption or centralized intervention, but through quiet steps. This essay examines how those long-term shifts unfolded. It draws on empirical indicators of emissions, energy use, and resource flows to illustrate how Sweden reduced its environmental weight while maintaining economic growth. 

Recycled aggregates materials are often relegated to downcycled applications such as backfilling. Different barriers limit their reintegration into higher-value construction use. This paper develops a probabilistic model of material flows using a Markov chain framework to simulate transitions between four states: Input, Use/Waste, Recycling, and Disposal. The model draws on Eurostat data covering non-metallic minerals in 27 EU Member States (2014–2023) and incorporates barrier-adjusted transition probabilities reflecting economic, technological, institutional, and social constraints. Scenario simulations reveal that improvements in recycling probabilities can yield nonlinear gains in material retention. However, once structural barriers are introduced, system performance declines sharply—even under favourable technical assumptions. The results suggest that modest policy interventions may have outsized effects if targeted toward key transition points.

Insider activism refers to situations where public officials use administrative discretion to advance personal or ideological preferences. Although the concept has received increasing attention in organizational and political science research, empirical evidence remains limited. This research note examines whether insider activism may influence regulatory practice in the Swedish forestry sector and how perceived enforcement uncertainty affects forest owners' behavior. A survey of forest owner representatives in southern Sweden indicates low trust in regulatory objectivity and weak perceptions of legal security. Many respondents report experiences of officials acting beyond their formal mandate. The findings suggest that perceived activism-driven uncertainty encourages defensive strategies among forest owners, including early harvesting and reduced willingness to report environmental values. 

Circular economy debates often acknowledge material lifespans and delays, but time is usually treated as a contextual issue rather than a structural barrier. The contribution is to reframe circular economy transitions as intertemporal processes by treating time as an endogenous structural barrier. A framework is developed that classifies goods into short-, medium-, and long-lived categories, demonstrating how lagged inflows and valuation biases suppress aggregate circularity even when technology improves. By making temporal mechanisms explicit, the analysis explains why indicators remain stagnant despite policy and efficiency gains. The contribution is to introduce time as an endogenous barrier, integrating insights from environmental and resource economics into circular economy theory and showing how delayed substitution shapes both firm investment and policy outcomes.

Circular economy systems are often designed with a focus on material flows and technological substitution, but their ecological performance is also shaped by geography. As a circular economy expands geographically, it encounters rising institutional diversity, logistical constraints, and behavioral divergence. This paper introduces a framework, based on lessons from the plastics industry, that models how spatial frictions—defined across regulatory, logistical, behavioral, economic, and coordination dimensions—accumulate with scale and undermine system performance. Costs escalate, and reliability deteriorates as circular systems become more spatially dispersed. These dynamics can result in delayed material recovery, inconsistent quality, and increased ecological inefficiency, even when technical feasibility exists. By placing geography at the center of analysis, the paper highlights the need for institutional harmonization, coordination buffers, and spatially adaptive system architectures to sustain circular transitions at scale. 

The metals sector faces multiple and interconnected barriers to achieving circularity. This study examines steel, aluminum, and copper to illustrate how challenges vary between metals. While copper can often be recycled without quality loss, steel and aluminum face alloy-related limitations that drive downcycling and quality degradation. Using a matrix-based analytical framework, the study maps the interactions between economic, technological, institutional, and social constraints, distinguishing between primary drivers, secondary effects, feedback loops, and lock-in mechanisms. The results show strong reinforcing links between economic, technological, and institutional domains, with social factors playing a more indirect role. These findings align with observed industry patterns while adding a structured, quantitative perspective. By clarifying how different barriers combine and reinforce one another, the analysis identifies priority areas for intervention to advance metals recycling and support the transition toward a more circular economy. 

Empirical research on barriers to a circular plastics economy has predominantly relied on case study approaches. While research has provided insights into the conceptual and anecdotal aspects of these barriers, a gap remains in the application of formalized methodologies to systematically understand and address them. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by developing an equation system tailored to the plastics industry, bringing clarity to the complex interplay of factors that constitute barriers to a circular economy. The study identifies four primary barriers to the circular economy, as documented in the literature between 2017 and 2024: economic, institutional and regulatory, technological, and social. The results include 24 equations, synthesized into four master equations. A mathematical case study demonstrates how numerical weights, and the relative importance of variables can differ between countries, offering a practical guide for applying the framework across diverse contexts. The study concludes that reducing regulatory ambiguity, scaling recycling infrastructure, and fostering consumer trust in recycled materials are critical steps. However, each country will face unique challenges, requiring policymakers to adopt tailored approaches and variable weighting.

The ongoing debate among economists regarding the presence of economic convergence or divergence has been reignited. This paper aims to dissect the extent of technological divergence or convergence among European Union member states, evaluating the effectiveness of the EU's pronounced goals for convergence. Defining a countries technological level is not straightforward, this study examines six key indicators: (a) scientific journal publications, (b) total patents, (c) high tech exports, (d) Gross domestic expenditure on R&D, (e) government budget on R&D, and (f) human resources in science and technology as a share of the active population. Employing both time-series and longitudinal methodologies, the analysis spans from 2000 to 2019. The findings reveal a gradual catching-up trend in the inventive capabilities across the EU. This modest pace of convergence necessitates a critical reassessment by policymakers of the current EU convergence strategies to ensure they effectively foster technological parity among member states.

The purpose of the chapter is to find out if the preference for working from home is different among different age cohorts, with a special interest in young workers attitudes. A survey involving 1,769 Swedish workers, among whom 1,000 were classified as office workers. In contrast to prevailing assumptions regarding the younger generation’s inclination towards remote work, our survey data from the Swedish labour market uncovers a surprising trend: it shows that young individuals exhibit a stronger preference for working in a physical office environment compared to their more senior counterparts. Overall, the results presented in the chapter underscore the rapid changes in working conditions, the need for updated knowledge, and the relevance of continuous labour market research. It provides valuable insights for both the public and policymakers, highlighting the importance of understanding diverse preferences and adapting to evolving work environments. The results underscore the necessity for customised employer policies that consider the diverse preferences within the workforce. 

Although the climate challenge requires proactive policies that spur innovation in the renewable energy sector, various countries commit vastly different levels of support for renewable energy R&D. This paper addresses the question why this may be the case. Specifically, the objective is to analyse the determinants of government support to renewable energy R&D in the European Union (EU), and, in doing this, we devote particular attention to the question of whether the level of this support tends to converge or diverge across EU Member States. The investigation relies on a data set of 12 EU Member States and a bias-corrected dynamic panel data estimator. We test for the presence of conditional β-convergence, and the impacts of energy dependence and electricity regulation on government R&D efforts. The findings display divergence in terms of government support to renewable energy R&D, and this result is robust across various model specifications and key assumptions. The analysis also indicates that countries with a low energy-import dependence and deregulated electricity markets tend to experience lower growth rates in government renewable energy R&D. The paper ends by discussing some implications of the results, primarily from an EU perspective.