Background: As Porter?s diamond (1990) suggested, the business environment highly influences firms? strategies. Today, most of the companies have to decide their strategy depending from a worldwide business environment. Yet, strategy researches and the growing importance of marketing for business success also show that customer dimension must be taken into consideration. On some markets and in certain industries, the offer is much higher than the demand and then, companies need to attract customers.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether the concept of permanent establishment, as defined in Article 5 of the OECD Model Tax Convention on Income and Capital, is applicable to electronic commerce and if so whether the current definition is able to appropriately deal with the challenges of electronic commerce.In 2003, the OECD added a new section to the Commentary on the Model Tax Convention on Article 5. The new section is a clarification on the application of the permanent establishment definition in electronic commerce.The current definition of permanent establishment in the Model Tax Convention relies on the physical presence of a foreign corporation as the threshold for source taxation. While the current definition, prima facie, might be applicable on electronic commerce, the highly mobile nature of electronic commerce might affect the current revenue distribution equilibrium between states..

Rising energy prices and higher energy demands have led to an increased focus on energy efficiency, in particular in the real estate business, where high potential for energy savings exists. Within the next few years, buildings that were constructed in the sixties and seventies will be in need of renovation. One of the challenges of these renovations will be to improve energy efficiency. A real estate company that is facing this challenge is Uppsalahem AB, based in the city of Uppsala, Sweden. This study focused on analyzing energy efficiency measures when renovating old buildings.

In this essay dog as a compatible model were put against human. The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes were compared between dogs, human, cat and mouse. To evaluate dog as a model and study similarities and differences was the aim with this review. Dog as a model contributes to understand mechanisms behind autoimmune diseases and showed clearly histological similarities between human and dogs concerning the skin disease mucous membrane pemphigoid (MMP)/cicatricial pemphgioid (CP). Further genetic evidence motivated the choice of using dog as a comprehensive model when the MHC-complex correlated with hypothyroiditis in Doberman dog as it does in human. Physiological similarities with low levels of thyroid hormones (T3 and T4) together with high level of thyroid releasing hormone (TSH) were found in the same way as in human.

  iiiAbstract?We are living in a time of project. Everything becomes project. All development, all efficient,all changes are running as project?.

The purpose of this study is to give us a deeper understanding about street workers importance for youths. We also wanted to investigate this from a gender perspective, both considering the street workers but also the youths. The focus for this study is on both the street workers and the youths. The study is based on a qualitative approach. We were going to study people and their behaviors.

Generally in Macedonia keeping farm records and farm business planning is not often practiced like an ordinary activity in farming. Therefore one of the crucial things to do it is to comprise and continuously practice record keeping of farm data. The efficient and justified farm business planning should be based on farm records about the previous work of the farm, which will bring a structured approach for planning all the activities, as well as provide a good basis for attracting investors and creditors for the additional expansion of the business.Given that sheep breeding holds an important part of the livestock production in Macedonia, there is a need for adding analytical sheep enterprise budgets to support the farm business planning process at sheep farms.The aim of this research was to develop sheep enterprise budgets created on the best production practice for Macedonian conditions of breeding and test their applicability into the farm business plan model Agriwise Macedonia. The sheep budgets were composed with a process of data collecting consisted of direct farm data (for the cases), expert's consultation and relevant desk research, as well as a literature study. The aim of doing it was to attain more accurate calculations of the enterprise budgets, which will result in a more precise outcome in the farm business plan model Agriwise Macedonia.

I have with this thesis sought to understand how chick lit could be useful in the classroom in the teaching of Swedish B-course in high school. Based on the model of critical literacy I am arguing that this genre would help to meet the objectives of the policy documents which, among other things, are to critically examine and analyze various types of texts.I have found that some of these texts could be used for analyzing and critically examine the ideological dimensions of texts and cultural heritage by the model of critical literacy, and also as a counterweight to the more traditional teaching of the canonical literature as a literary historical stuff that students should learn. I have also wanted to create a basis for discussions about literature in the classroom based on the chick lit genre. To do this I have, based on three themes and questions from the model of critical literacy, tried to focus on issues that might emerge from the ideological analysis and critical review. The model aims to deconstruct norms of society, and in the work of chick lit, I wanted to show how you could deconstruct norms around gender..

The purpose of this essay is to identify the costs of illness in different organizations, and compare the calculated result with the actual result in their annual reports.We collected information thru interviews with the personnel manager in the selected organizations, and used the annual reports to add necessary information.When we applied our model, we found that the selected organizations, in some cases, have a cost of illnes which is up to seven times higher than shown in their annual reports. It?s, in general, the costs that aren?t related to the salary (additional costs), which are much higher than shown.The absence of a model that calculates the costs of illnes can result in wrongful decisions. If a model would be applied in an organization, it should increase the awearness of the actual costs of illnes, which can lead to better decisions througout the whole organization.This report is written in Swedish..

In order to facilitate trade between EU members, the European Committee has created regulations that will govern supervision of organic products. Every regulatory agency shall, according to the European Committees regulations, carry out a risk classification of each organic producer they regulate. This study for The National Food Administration compares regulation of Swedish organic products with other countries, and aims to produce a simplified model based on risk that can be the beginning of the risk classification model that Sweden in the current situation don?t have. The thesis is based on three questions: 1) What criteria should we use for assigning organic food producers? 2) How do selected European countries and frontrunners rate organic producers and what can Sweden learn from them? 3) How might a national classification model of organic production look in order to ensure an equivalent level of regulation and prevent competition among private inspection bodies? A review of information gathered from the different countries gave differing results.

The essay deals with the subject about branding and the communicative process that entails between businesses and consumers. The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the opportunities and risks of brand building through sponsorship and Co-Branding. This descriptive analysis is made by highlighting the partnership between two strong brands in the Swedish market, Åbro & AIK, and how internal and external associations related to their impact on brand equity. The study has led to the conclusion that the sponsorship should be seen as synonymous with Co-branding, ie. a synergy between two or more brands.

Title: Competition for small audit firms ? a qualitative study on possible competitive strategies and how the upcoming changes will influence competition on the audit market    Subject: Auditing Tutor: Margareta Paulsson  Authors: Per Dahlström and Martin Holmberg Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an understanding how smaller auditing firms use competitive strategies and why. The result aims to work as a support for owners and leaders of audit firms as they make decisions of how to compete in the future. We would also like to explore how smaller audit firms view the change of the mandatory audit, that is, our intentions are also to examine how they think the consequences on the market will be and their view on its affect on the competition of the market.    Methodology: Our methodological approach was characterized by a hermeneutic approach in order to explain and understand why the smaller audit firms do what they do. Our approach is a combination of inductive and deductive as it allows us to develop an understanding of the subject, then gather our empirical data and from that draw valid conclusions.

Too much attention has been given to mainstream approaches in performance management and management accounting research, without taking in to account changes in the environment with the rapid growth of online retailing. This paper evaluates how and/or if performance management differs in online contexts by using a conceptual model developed by Ferreira et al (2009). The model and its components are tested on three multichannel- and six e-commerce businesses. The result and its analysis is commented on by two e - commerce experts. The result shows that the operation method of the models twelve components do not differ in terms of work methods in online and offline contexts.

Purpose: During the last years Real Options have been established in many areas of the day-to-day business. Recent literature also tries to address Supply Chain problems with option theory, since an efficient Supply Chain increasingly gains in importance as a significant competitive advantage. This thesis tries to answer the question, if Real Options can mitigate the costs induced by the Bullwhip Effect as one of the major problems in Supply Chains. Methodology: The authors of the thesis used a deductive approach. Based on a theoretical model utilizing Real Option contracts and under the usage of a randomly created dataset the influence of the Bullwhip Effect on the company?s business and financial structure is examined and subsequently analyzed.

This essay discusses and evaluates the international currency market in regards to efficiency. To prove the theory that, the difference between expected and actual exchange rates is explained by the difference in expected and actual interest rates and the difference in expected and actual inflation between countries, a model was developed. This model was inspired by the paper of Sebastian Edwards (1982), and is based on three theories; UIP, IS/LM and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. The model uses 16 regressions estimated from three pairs of curriencies: $/SEK, £/SEK and ?/SEK.