Today there is a keen competition between regions in the world for companies and inhabitants in order to improve regional development and economic growth. In many regions there is an active effort to create a good home base for companies and inhabitants. Since 2003 municipalities in nine counties in Sweden have come together in co-operative agencies in order to work towards more efficient regional development.This essay focuses on the relation between the state and the co-operative agencies in the regional development policy and which possibilities the state gives the co-operative agencies to pursue an efficient regional development policy, both legally and financially. I have researched and analysed this through models and ideas on how the state governs the administration and through the translation theory. The result of my study is that the co-operative agencies have a relatively large amount of freedom to make there own priorities, but the ability to act efficiently within regional development is limited..

The aim of my study is to illuminate the borders, both spatial and aspatial, that are drawn around Europe in swedish politics by using the word in question in different ways. To increase my possibilites of comparing different concepts of Europe, I have chosen to restrict my study toFolkpartiet and Vänsterpartiet, which are the two swedish parties who seem to stand the furthest from each other on issues regarding Europe and the EU. Using theory on borders and bordering, I construct an analytical framework consisting of a separation of three categories of entities, around which borders can be drawn. In my search for both obvious and implicit ways of filling the word Europe with content, I find that both parties speak of Europe in a highly contradictory way, which both includes and excludes peripheral regions of a geographical Europe. My second conclusion is that both parties tend to associate Europe with things that are positive to them.

Sweden became a member of the European Union in 1995. Consequently Sweden became obligated to implement the Working Time Directive 2003/88/EC (formerly termed 93/104/EC). At that time Sweden considered that their legislation already gave their employees as high level of protection as the directive prescribed. Instead they decided upon an adjustment of the collective agreements concerning working time. A particular EC-restriction was incorporated in the Working Hours Act (SFS 1982:673).

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the most important establishment criteria for companies whointend to do a new establishment. There are differences between regions regarding attraction on startup.Some regions have few new businesses while others continuously expanded its activities in variousfields. The biggest focus on the thesis is the Gävle- Borlänge region where MellansvenskaHandelskammaren is active.Mellansvenska Handelskammaren saw a need for the assignment after the magazine ?IntelligentLogistik? ranked the Gävle region at 15:th place and Falun/Borlänge at 20:th place in the list over thetop 25 best logistics locations in Sweden. This made them wonder what could be made to develop intoa better area with more amenities and a better place in the ranking of the magazine.

The Swedish State Road Administration has since 1992 procured operations and maintenance of state roads on the open market. The procurement has been termed ?Grundpaket Drift?, GPD, and comprises mostly operational measures for road networks.The clients of GPD, SRA regions, have gradually changed the original documentation in order to adapt it to local conditions. This process has gradually led to that some parts of the documentation are creating problems for contractors interested in procuring jobs.This thesis tries to analyze GPD and clarify the differences that may be essential to the procurement process and to facilitate future joint working projects and processing descriptions..

The goal of this work is to get as good a basis as possible to explain what the owners want for products and services when those doing business with buying groups in Korsnäs purchases regions: Gävleborg, Dalarna, Uppland and Frövi. It should also provide Korsnäs knowledge of the most important factors to consider in business with the owners. Another important aspect is to find out what you have done better at the business with owners, to eventually be able to preserve and take them into account. 300 questionnaires sent out to randomly selected owners in these regions. This is to find out what the owners did not have the products/services of Korsnäs. 29 questions were asked in the affected areas to identify what was missing and to eventually be able to satisfy them.

The proportion of women entrepreneurs in Sweden is, as in many countries, smaller than the proportion of men entrepreneurs. Sweden has therefore created political measures with the ambition to increase women entrepreneurship. However, knowledge about the determinants of women entrepreneurship is needed in order to enable the promotion of it and, at the same time one can question the treatment of women entrepreneurs as a homogenous group. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the determinants of women entrepreneurship and whether these determinants fluctuate regionally. If this proves to be the case, a more spatial/individual approach should be used, when creating measures to promote entrepreneurship.

Due to the forest industry downsizing, many communities in rural forest regions in Canada and Sweden are facing problems to survive. In order to create community sustainability, resilience and well-being in remote forest regions, the view on the forest resources has shifted towards multiple use, through the concept of sustainable forest management (SFM). Beside the economic and ecological elements of sustainability, the social forest values are needed, contributing to the human well-being, local participation, stakeholder collaboration, human rights and cultural connection. In this thesis the embodiment of the social component of SFM within Prince Albert Model Forest (Canada), and Vilhelmina Model Forest (Sweden) will be examined. Being partners and facing similar challenges as rural boreal forest regions, the two model forests are compared through analysis of projects and activities, conducted interviews and organization documents. Looking at projects mentioned as successful by the interviewees, they all have elements from the social values of SFM. The direction can be explained by the introduction of the Forest Communities Program in Canada, demanding the Model Forests to work towards community stability and resilience, the Model Forest organization concept itself and the way global focus are increasing around social forest values. In the future, it may be important that the role of the MFs enable some kind of political authorization and legitimacy in order to improve conflict solving and indigenous rights equality.

In the end of 1998 the company Holmen Skog AB was certified accordint to the FSC system with an area of 1 036 000 hectare. After that Holmen Skog AB has been working actively with the nature conservation in the forestry. In order to control the quality of the company?s nature conservation in final fellings they started a yearly inventory which is called BAKRUS (Judgement of ecological and culture care in relations to policies for a persevering silviculture). After 1999 the control was expended to include all actions in the forest.

Title: Territorial identities and fusions- regional identity by interregional fusions Level: Final assignment for Bachelors Degree in Social Science with specialization in Urban and Regional Planning. Major subject: Geography. Author: Mladen Krajisnik Supervisor: Carl-Johan Nordblom Date: 2009 May Intention: The main focus of this study is to verify the existence, or nonexistence, of local and regional identities. Considering the result regarding regional identities, this thesis will continue on to clarify if these identities are to be seemed as a threat or resource during fusions, and if so, how can one best manage these different identities.Method: Only secondary data has been used in this study. I've botanized amongst the literature that processes fusions, impact of culture, identities, regions, territory. Continuing on, the collected empirical resources have been compared to my theory, from which an analysis was able to be spawned and conclusions were drawn.Result & Conclusions: The thesis confirms different regional identities, although it does not treat the subject regarding the inner strength of regions comparing to one another.

This thesis investigates the 200 year old phenomena of savings banks and if they increase the economic growth (GDP) in the local region they act in. That is being done by testing three hypotheses; the savings banks increase the attractiveness of the region they act in; the savings banks increase the entrepreneurship in the region they act in; and the savings banks increase the economic growth in region they act in. This quantitative cross-sectional study with data from the year 2010, finds that the savings banks increase the attractiveness of the local region, most likely through the efforts and financials they put into different local projects. A positive result is also found for increased entrepreneurship in the regions that have a local savings bank. The result is explained by the savings banks relationship lending, which increase the likeliness for a company to get the credit they need to start and develop.

The purpose of this study was to examine the foreign news flow in Sweden´s largest news agency TT. Since TT has an important position as a news provider to most of Sweden´s local and national news outlets, it was important to examine exactly what their news stories consisted of.The theoretical background of this study consist of theories of news values, agenda setting, dependency theory and the theory about the ?news shadow? a lack of coverage leads to.In our quantitative study we have looked at 506 articles taken from the TT news flow during two weeks In November 2013. We have studied which continents and countries the news origins from, who have supplied the text, the topics of the news, which one gets to speak in the text and what general tone the story has.The study shows that the supply of news follows the criteria of news values. It also shows that in some regions of the world the coverage is almost nonexistent.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is an unconventional model of agriculture expected to contribute to a more sustainable food supply and a sustainable landscape; the development of rural areas; a stronger relationship between producer and consumer and a healthier diet. This study, with a focus on food production and the link between the producer and consumer, describes the origin and current development of CSA in Sweden, including the prerequisites for CSA in a Swedish context. Organizations and entrepreneurs working with CSA and related projects are identified and interviewed. The notion of CSA in Sweden is still in its infancy, but a rapidly growing interest currently can be detected. The fact that the identified CSAs are found in different Swedish regions with variations in degree of urbanization and intensity of agriculture indicates that the prerequisites are there for the concept to grow, both in rural as well as urban areas.

Every year, Swedish municipalities transfer considerable amounts of profit from public housing companies to the owner municipality. Municipalities are allowed to do this, provided that the money is used to pay for certain purposes. But there are no legal repercussions if they do not comply. Not all municipalities choose to transfer profits. Based on partisan theory, this difference could be explained by the political governance of the municipality.

Regionalization has become a catchphrase in European countries during the last twenty years with the establishment of the European Union. An ideational development has occurred during time towards emphasing more politicially powerful regions with the idea of new regionalism. Sweden represents a deviant case study, where regions historically have been politically weak and where Sweden has been characterized as a strong unitary state. The aim of this paper is to analyze the political debate in the Swedish parliament concerning the implementation of a stronger regional level (storregioner) during 2007-2010 and to determine if the debate can be characterized as a case of depoliticalization. The theory of depoliticalization have been introduced by Richard Katz and Peter Mair to explain why political parties through external pressure from europeanisation and globalization tend to become more consensual with similar political agendas, leading to a diminished the lef-right scale.