An increasing number of automotive supplier companies are investing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in order to gain cost advantages. This has happened in a rapid pace since many of these countries did not have any Foreign direct investments (FDI) at the turn of the century. The problem now is for how long these countries will be able to maintain the low costs. One purpose was to create a model of country advantages for automotive supplier companies when relocating further production to CEE. This dissertation was written in cooperation with the Trelleborg Group.

Large-scale land investments is not a new phenomenon, but increasing prices on food and agrofuels have inflated prices on land and has led to an enhanced interest in landinvestments from a range of different actors. The ProSavana project in the Nacala corridor in the Nampula province, northern Mozambique is a large-scale land investment with the purpose of establishing intensive commercial agriculture and is planned to be implemented this year (2013). The project is financed by Brazil and Japan in collaboration with the government of Mozambique. It is not quite clear how large-scale land investments affect the areas they are implemented in and how they can affect the possibilities for sustainable development in these areas. Both opportunities and problems can be observed within the social, economic and ecological dimensions of sustainable development.

SummaryThe numbers of students in higher education with foreign background are still lower than expected. The universities around the country are increasingly committed to attract students among this group. Many of investments and researches have been done to explore new approaches. There is need to understand how students evaluate their choices. These studies will help marketing the educations which are more responsive to student's expectations.

This essay aims to explore the development of the common foreign and security policy within the European Union as well as the recent addition of the post of High representative in the field of the common foreign and security policy. This essay will attempt to achieve this trough exploring the questions; how have the aim of the European foreign policy developed, how the forms of cooperation has within this field developed and finally what impact will the recent addition of a high representative for the common foreign and security have. My aim is to answer these questions with the help of neo-functionalism.The results that came out of this essay point to the direction that the neo- functionalist premise about spill over effects and the notion about increased supranational influence turn out to have some validity in them. The study has shown that during the time the cooperation within the field of foreign and security policy have developed it is possible to see that supranational institutions will gain influence when the scope of integration within a policy area widens and deepens..

Foreign correspondence is essential for our understanding of the world and therefore it is paramount that we be aware of how it is affected by modern technology and altered economic conditions.In this study we set out to investigate the state of foreign correspondence today, in comparison to twenty years ago. More specifically we compared foreign news articles from a week in 1993 and the same week in 2013, in the Swedish newspapers Expressen and Dagens Nyheter. We chose these newspapers as we felt they each represented a different area of Swedish journalism, DN being a regular morning newspaper and Expressen being a tabloid newspaper.We looked mainly at three things in the articles: who was the writer, i.e. was the article by a correspondent, a news agency or someone else, what source was used and what part of the world was it about. We then made comparisons between both the different years and the different newspapers, as well as current and twenty years old lists of correspondents.According to the material we looked at there were some clear differences between foreign correspondence 1993 and 2013.

Foreign aid is a very debated and controversial topic. The most recent studies have focused more on GDP growth and foreign aid correlation, however not much of the debate has focused on what kind of foreign aid should be given. The most common foreign aid is budget support, often a bilateral funds transfer between two countries. This kind of foreign aid can be both conditional and unconditional from the donors? perspective.

Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978) is the most important reference point in the post-colonial theory and describes how the West is dominant over the Orient. There is a clear distinction between "us" and "the other" and the purpose of this study is that, from a postcolonial perspective, focusing on Said's theoretical concepts "the other" and "discourse", examining how two foreign-born people with ethnic backgrounds living in the same place, are looking at themselves, at other foreign-born and native Swedes. My questions to answer this are; ?what are the concepts of "the other" and "discourse" and is it possible to use these concepts to examine how foreign-born people are looking at themselves, at other foreign-born and native Swedes in a specific location??, ?who is "the other" in a place where there are almost as many native Swedes as foreign-born??, and ?how do these two foreign-born people with ethnic backgrounds perceive Norrliden as a place and what effect has that place had on their identity?? I have used a post-colonial philosophical ground and a qualitative approach, focusing on two different interviews with two men, living in Norrliden. In Norrliden almost 50% of the inhabitants are foreign-born were both of the interview-persons are feeling safe and secure.

The Swedish CFC rules imply a taxation of Swedish partners of foreign legal persons subject to low income tax, which is based on a fictitious distribution. Thus, tax is levied even if the dividend has not been paid to the shareholder. The aim of the Swedish CFC legislation, which was put into force in 1990, was to prevent tax evasion and to protect the Swedish tax base. The reason was that the foreign exchange control was abolished, which made investments in foreign countries possible for Swedish companies. A CFC legislation was considered necessary for Sweden in order not to lose tax revenues.The legislation was strengthened on January 1st 2004 as a consequence of the abolished taxation of capital income of commercial shares.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how large Swedish corporations within the same industry protect themselves against foreign exchange risks and to determine if there is a general practice for how the protection is done. What is the responsibility structure at these corporations regarding the handling of exposure to foreign exchange?.

The purpose with this report is to highlight the value which Enterprise Architecture (EA) can bring,including the effects that can emerge, for a business. In the report we also study how Enterprise Architecturemay serve as basis for generating even more business value. The study is based on a theoretical frameworkwhich covers the following perspectives; architecture design, strategy development, management of changeand evaluation of IT-investments. Gathering and analysis of empirical data has been performed using acustom-developed model which is based on a model from Sogeti called Dynamic Architecture (van DenBerg and van Steenbergen, 2006) and Innovation Value Institute?s maturity curve (Innovation ValueInstitute, 2008) for Enterprise Architecture management.Explaining the value of Enterprise Architecture is invariably an important topic since many organizationsexpect to be able to generate quick value of the investments made in Enterprise Architecture.

The concept of leadership development plays an important role within the modern organization. As a result of the increasing interest in developing leadership competencies, investments in leadership development programs are becoming a common part of business strategies. However, the return on those investments is seldom evaluated. The reason for this is considered to be the complexity created by the many factors that influence leadership but have no relation to the program. This is a case study based on interviews with participants from a one-year leadership development program that was carried out at AB Previa.

The organisation of the municipalities is based on the principle of representation. It has previously been impossible to give the citizens more influence through direct democracy, but the information technology gives new possibilities and the choice of democracy model might no longer be obvious. Representation can be interpreted in many ways and there is a need for a more distinct definition of the rule that the municipalities shall be governed according to the principle of representation. It should also be further investigated how the new technology can be used to increase the use of direct democracy. The municipalities ought to work to supplement the representation with direct democracy in the form of active discourse with the citizens.

In the government's bill on infrastructure for 2010-2021, the government presents that road investments should be prioritized before investments in the railway. The grants for operation and maintenance of the railways are much higher then in the last government's bill. Furthermore the current founding of investment in railways is higher then for road investment which is in opposite of the bill on infrastructure's directives. Therefore the purpose with my thesis is to find which factors that can explain how come the government has chosen to take these actions. As a model to help me achieve my purpose I have been using a modified version of the DBO-theory, where the basic factors to explain an action is Desire, Belief and Opportunities.

The aim of this paper is to examine how young men of foreign background are pictured in the realistic adolescence novels of 2009. In my process of work I have used a classical schedule for literature analysis from which I have worked out a few questions to use on my texts. The questions are related to the main characters and some of the most important minor characters ? all are young men with foreign background ? and focuses on aspects of for example where they live, who their friends are and what they think about and dream of.To put these pictures into a wider perspective I compare my results with the well known stereotype picturing of men with foreign background in media. I then discuss how or if this affects the young men?s picture of themselves and the majority society?s picture of them.

With background in the acknowledgement of the current period of major change in the characteristics of traditional Swedish foreign policy, considering the membership in the European Union, as well as the new contextual scenarios that Sweden has been situated in after the end of the cold war, this thesis aims at scrutinizing the Swedish Foreign Policy from 1991 to 2010. The purpose of the thesis is further to localize continuity and change in the ideas which Sweden has explicitly stated in its foreign policy. Based on the theory of institutionalism, the thesis also aims to bring forward plausible explanations built on the main empirical findings. This has been done by identifying different types of goals and means within realism and liberalism as well as categorizing each theory within three ideal types.The chosen research method has been a qualitative text analysis with focus on an ideational analysis. The material on which the descriptive analysis is based upon is constituted by the annual statements of government policy in parliamentary debates on foreign affairs.The results of the thesis show that the ideas that are related to solidarity, consensus and active foreign policy are constant through the period of examination.