Conditions for doing business in rural areas: Survey evidence from in-movers and stayers

This paper examines the conditions for business success in rural Sweden, with a particular focus on differences between business owners who have grown up in rural areas (“stayers”) and those who have migrated there as adults (“in-movers”). We draw on a unique, large-scale survey, linked to administrative register data, covering business owners aged 25–55 with firms of up to ten employees. This combined dataset provides detailed insights into both perceptions of business conditions and objective background characteristics. Our analysis shows that business owners in rural municipalities place greater weight on both enabling and constraining factors than their counterparts in non-rural areas, reflecting the thinner institutional environment of rural regions. Within rural areas, stayers emphasize locally embedded factors, e.g., municipal responsiveness and access to local services, whereas in-movers highlight the importance of communications and transport infrastructure and are more often oriented toward external markets. Regression analyses reveal that these differences are largely attributable to compositional factors: in-movers are more educated, more often female, and more likely to operate in skill-intensive service sectors, while stayers are concentrated in agriculture and other location-dependent industries. Robustness checks confirm that our conclusions remain stable across alternative specifications. These findings highlight the complementary roles of stayers and in-movers in rural entrepreneurial ecosystems. Policy interventions should therefore be multifaceted, strengthening local institutions and services while also investing in transport and digital infrastructure to support diverse forms of rural entrepreneurship. • Unique survey linked with Swedish register data on rural business owners. • Rural business owners stress local conditions more than non-rural counterparts. • Rural in-movers focus on transport and digital infrastructure, external markets. • Rural stayers emphasize local demand, services, and municipal responsiveness. • Differences largely explained by education, gender, and sectoral composition.