Historisk Tidskrift. Utgiven av Svenska historiska föreningen
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Historisk tidskrift 132:1 • 2012

Innehåll (Contents) 2012:1

Uppsatser (Articles)

Sjösäkerhet på entreprenad. Ett kontraktsteoretiskt perspektiv på privata och statliga fyrar i Sverige före 1840

Erik Lindberg

 

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Summary

Safety at sea contracted out: private and public lighthouses in Sweden before 1840

Ronald Coase’s famous 1974 paper “The Lighthouse in Economics” (in Journal of Law and Economics) is widely cited as demonstrating that private enterprise can produce so called public goods, i.e. goods that are beneficial to society but cannot be individually consumed. Coase cited a number of famous nineteenth and twentieth century economists who all argued that the lighthouse service is a quintessential government activity. Coase reached the conclusion that, historically, in England there existed a relatively efficient privately financed lighthouse system. Coase not only intended to revise the economic theory of public goods, he also had a methodological agenda: instead of highbrow theorising, economists should generalize their findings based on “studies of how such activities are actually carried out within different institutional frameworks”. In this paper I provide such a study, an account of the workings of the Swedish lighthouse system. In Sweden the lighthouse service was provided by a mix of private parties and the government, until most private lighthouses were bought by the government in the 1830s. By using insights from the public-private partnership literature I explain the rise of private stakes in lighthouses in the seventeenth century and the government takeover in the 1830s.

Keywords

Sweden, Coase, lighthouses, contracting out, incomplete contracts, history