Background: The current trend of a decrease in globalization has created a new scenario for SMEs, with increased protectionist measures and delivery issues, acting as an enabler or a disabler for growth. Therefore, understanding how SMEs are affected is vital, as 99.9% of all Swedish companies are SMEs, meaning that they are crucial for regional well-being. Researching the effect on the growth of SMEs could provide important insight into how SMEs could adapt and mitigate the effects of a decrease in globalization. This study investigates how a decrease in globalization affects the growth of SMEs, utilizing the literature on SME growth and the framework of external enablers. Purpose: This study aims to explore how a decrease in globalization affects the growth of SMEs. Method: The study follows an interpretivist approach through multiple case studies, by conducting semi-structured interviews. Further, the research uses an inductive approach. The empirical data was analyzed following the model by Gioia et al. (2013), where aggregated dimensions were identified. Conclusion: The empirical findings suggest that a decrease in globalization affected SMEs' growth directly through extrinsic events, value chain disruptions, and changes in internal strategies, and internal strategies were further affected by external events. The findings further suggest that the effects are dependent on the industry and the owners´ perception. Therefore, whether a decrease in globalization enables SME growth depends on the interactions between external events and the internal strategies of SMEs. This study contributes to the literature on SME growth and extends the external enabler framework to existing organizations.

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published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

This dissertation is an account of a Bornean hunting and gathering group, the Punan of Long Suluy, as it transitions from an economy based primarily in subsistence foraging to one increasingly oriented to the market and about the accompanying social shifts associated with that transition. It focuses on the period stretching from the mid-1960s until 2004 during which time an Arab Indonesian trader managed to establish and maintain what constituted a one-man monopoly over the Punans' trade in commercialized forest products. The relationship between the Punan and this trader began as one based solely in economics and eventually transformed into a type of patron-client relationship embedded in terms of mutual obligations and quasi-kin relations. As the Punan became increasingly involved in market relations and to adopt values based in material accumulation and an identity referenced outside of their own social group, they became increasingly adversarial with the trader, transitioning from subservient laborers to competitors in the forest product trade. This dissertation investigates both the shifting political economy of the Punan during this time period and their internal social dynamics as they negotiate their increasing participation in the market.

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This study attempts to ascertain the role of the World Bank and its problematical issues in Balkan countries. The foreign aid holds a key impact in these economies, but on the other hand it embraces a controversial aspect. The contradictory role of the World Bank lies in aid ineffectiveness at reducing poverty and sustaining economic growth. The foreign aid inflows did not manage to fulfill its objectives efficiently, since they created income inequalities in the region favoring distinctive economies. Corruption and bad-governmental management would expand the controversially further. Additionally, the study analyzes the impact of aid on economic growth empirically using a panel data set comprising of five Balkan economies during 2000-2010 period. We find negative and significant evidence of aid impact on growth. Moreover, the relation between governance and growth resulted positive. Results display a clear framework of aid ineffectively across the region. The Balkan countries should therefore focus on a better effective management of the World Bank aid to reduce poverty, income inequality and to achieve the economic growth.

This dissertation critically investigates how German culture is transculturated in Japan and in South Korea and then reproduced in a new form of manga/manhwa. These visual representations are evidence of a long history of German literary transculturation amid Japanese and Korean reading culture. Beginning with moral education materials in the 1880s, I trace the widespread reception of Grimms' fairy tales in East Asia and argue that the success of the translations of the tales was due to the particularly successful fusion of Confucian values with the Western story form. German literature first entered the Japanese reading culture through the Grimms' fairytales as a moral education tool. The reading reception shifted from educational space to private space and Japanese reader began to enjoy the Grimms' fairytales outside of the classroom, which contributed to the spread of German literature. This led to a veritable Grimm boom at the end of the twentieth century, including a corpus of critical analysis by Asian scholars and fairy tale retellings from feminist perspectives that creatively fuse ideas of East and West. The globalization of manga, in turn, contributed to the scholarly discourse in the West, which nourished a rethinking and redeployment of complex borrowing practices between Asian and German literatures. From the impact of Grimms' fairy tales, I trace the reception of the German literature in the Japanese pop literature medium manga and analyze Grimms Manga by the Japanese manga artist Kei Isiyama. Grimms' fairy tales paved the way for the entry of German literature and I investigate Yoko Tawada's works, who writes in Japanese and in German and incorporates fairy tale tropes and the legacy of German romanticism in the age of transnational globalization through her visual descriptive writing. I examine the Japanese author Kouhei Kadono, whose works, I claim, display the romantic themes of the German Romantics and Richard Wagner's nationalistic ideological views of societal changes. I then shift from German literature' influence in Japan to South Korea and I juxtapose the manhwa The Tarot Café with Goethe's Faust to investigate gender roles. After displaying German transculturation in the selected works, I argue that manga contributes to the German classroom as part of a multiliteracies framework in a collegiate language classroom.

Thesis advisor: Thomas Massaro / Globalization is a social and economic fact. It is best described as the ascendancy of the free market regulated by supply and demand. By the manner in which trade has been extended, along with the ease of financial investing and reinvesting and the migration of people, globalization has engineered a global growth and stimulated the creation of wealth in such a way that for many it "has been an economic godsend," "a common climb to the top, a rising tide raising all boats." However the growth generated has not always benefited all nations. The African countries, including Benin, have been deeply hurt by the negative aspects of globalization and they have been marginalized by increasing poverty, inequality and injustice resulting from the expansion of privatization and liberalization. / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Thesis advisor: Fabio Ghironi / Thesis advisor: Peter Ireland / This thesis includes three essays. The first chapter analyzes how the implications of productivity shocks in an open economy can differ depending on the size of the economy relative to the rest of the world. It employs a stylized two-country general equilibrium model with love of variety, where economies differ in size and shows that a dynamic home market effect is present: productivity shocks that lower production and entry costs lead to deterioration of home terms of trade when home is small relative to the rest of the word but to improvement of terms of trade when home is large. The second chapter analyzes the role of globalization in the lack of convergence of living standards within Europe, despite integration processes. Building on theoretical and empirical literature on trade and income inequality in the U.S. this chapter proposes a model that describes how globalization affects disparities between countries in Europe. To quantitatively assess this effect, a measure of exposure to globalization is constructed, using detailed trade, employment, and output data. The chapter shows that the relative performance of countries within Europe is correlated with their exposure to globalization. In particular, countries that experienced relative declines of living standards over the past decade have been most exposed to globalization. The third chapter explores the implications of demand side pricing complementarities and endogenous markups in open economy. It shows that endogenous markups resulting from translog preferences imply richer dynamics for international relative prices that have better chances to match the data. Further, countercyclical markups lead to endogenous procyclical movement as well as cross-country correlation of measured TPF. It also shows that in a stylized model endogenous markups may act as a transmission mechanism, leading in particular to positive GDP co-movement across borders as opposed to a benchmark CES model. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.