Earlier Research Areas

From its establishment in 1987 up until the mid-1990s the Research Unit carried out a number of projects in which, however, no activities are ongoing at present.

The first project was Time and Consumption, carried out from 1987 to 1990. In this project a group of researchers investigated how the Danes’ use of time has changed since the 1960s. As the project title suggests, the Board of the Rockwool Foundation also required an analysis of the link between changes in the use of time and shifts in patterns of consumption.

With the project The Danish Labour Market, published in 1992, the Rockwool Foundation took up the major problem of unemployment existing at that time, and in the project Public Trust in Politicians – also published in 1992 – the researchers shed light on the myth of the Danes’ distrust of the political system.

At the beginning of the 1990s there was also a considerable demand for serious environmental economic research, and the Board of the Rockwool Foundation asked the Research Unit to take up this topic. Accordingly, the Research Unit published a project in 1995 in cooperation with Statistics Denmark concerning the environment and welfare: Society and the Environment. The project was a study of changes in the economic well-being of Danes during the period from 1970 to 1990 as viewed when the figures for consumption in the national economic data were corrected by taking into account factors external to consumption and welfare-reducing factors which are not normally included in this type of statistics, such as  the negative effects of pollution.