"State Ownership in the HQ Economy"

In 2000 and 2001, the former government utility operator Telenor, and the formerly fully stateowned enterprise Statoil became publicly listed companies with the Norwegian state as majority shareholder. Other major Norwegian companies shared the same status as “hybrid state owned enterprises” (Vining & Laurin, 2020), making the Norwegian state the largest owner at the Oslo stock exchange (Lie et al., 2014). Through a complex legislative process in the years up to 2007, the retainment of the headquarters of these companies within Norwegian borders become the official justification for continued state ownership, along with maximization of returns (Lie, 2016). At the same time, the concept of a “Headquarters Economy”, which refers to spill-overs and positive externalities for host cities of large business headquarters, rose to prominence in the fields of international business and urban geography. (Shaver, 2018), The concept has been especially influential in China, which even created its own “HQ Economy Research Center”, as part of government efforts to attract business headquarters to bolster regional economic development. (Chan & Poon, 2012; Pan et al., 2015) Where efforts at attracting HQ’s have often related to the importance of white collar workers and R&D activities, the Norwegian state’s aim of retaining the HQ’s it already has, also contained elements of industrial policy and notions of protecting national interests, inherited from the politics of state owned enterprises in the past.(Christensen, 2018; Colli & Nevalainen, 2019) This paper considers the state of research on spill-over effects of headquarter locations. Based on interviews, studies of official documents and records of public debates, it then creates a typology of how Norwegian stakeholders have conceptualized the economic value and benefits to the nation of retaining the headquarters of large multinational enterprises through continued state ownership in partially privatized companies.