Destination governance has emerged as a very important issue in local and regional development in Sweden. The article investigates the pattern in which local tourism governance operates based on a single case study of the ski resort of Hemavan and Tärnaby, and evaluates the effectiveness of this governance pattern on local tourism development according to a six-measurement criteria scale. A semi-structured interview approach with open-ended questions was used in this paper. Ten respondents were interviewed in Hemavan and Tärnaby, and they are representatives from both private and public sector. In the concluding section, the results are developed into an evaluation and analysis concerning how the characteristics of the local DMO matter in terms of its governance effectiveness. The results indicate that overall the DMO is an effective form by organizing various actors with mutual resource dependencies. However, the uneven balance of power between Tärnaby and Hemavan, as well as between various network participants, is hard to reconcile, which may strongly influence their governance effectiveness. / Managing Heritage Assets as Tourism Products - The case of the World Heritage of the Falun Copper Mine

In the realm of globalization, international sourcing of services contributes to reshape firm’s value chains as the physical dispersion of these activities increases. This reorganization does not simply lead to the replication of domestic activities in a destination providing resource advantages, but, in most cases, it implies profound modifications of the flows of activities, including the reconsideration of the boundaries of the firm. Global sourcing strategies, also called offshoring, seek to increase firm’s efficiency by combining the exploitation of foreign locational advantages with process redesign. When aggregated, these firm-level strategies translate into considerable international exchanges to a point that flows of intermediate services represent about 73% of the total of international trade in services for 2005 (OECD, 2009). These activities present a high degree of heterogeneity in terms of functions concerned, the related domestic industries, motivations, destinations, organizational structure or scope. This wave of internationalization, because of its relative novelty, growth and rapid diversification, draws the interest from the public, political and academic spheres but the comprehension of the determinants shaping the configuration and organization of these activities still remain largely unknown. Based on four essays, this PhD thesis addresses the impact of host-country characteristics and distance factors on the configuration of international sourcing activities in the dimensions of location, governance model and scope of activities.<p><p>The first paper studies the country-specific determinants of the interdependent choices of destination and governance model in the global sourcing of services. I explore the simultaneity of these decisions and I jointly estimate their determinants using implementation-level data. Derived from comparative advantages, host-country uncertainty and the global dispersion of tasks, I present three classes of factors driving global sourcing configurations: resource arbitrages, host-country risk and communication barriers. Empirical results confirm that locations with resource or capabilities advantages specific to services – low labour cost, education and labour supply – attract more offshoring activities. However the pursued resource advantages differ depending on the governance model. Country attractiveness for captive implementations presents a higher positive sensitivity to the education-intensive resources, while outsourcing strategies have a greater cost-cutting orientation coming from labour cost arbitrages. Furthermore, the risks inherent to the host-country, in the form of weak formal institutions and inexperience in the destination, have the dual effect of deterring location attractiveness, while they foster the adoption of the outsourcing model compared to the captive one. Communication barriers coming from geographic distance, cultural and linguistic differences have the simultaneous effect of discouraging global sourcing in those locations while, to overcome these constraints, firms favor higher integration with the use of captive models. <p><p>This second paper further explores the mechanisms through which home-host country distances affect the choice of governance mode in service offshoring. Using a Transaction Cost Economics approach, I explore the comparative costs of the hierarchical and contractual models to show that different dimensions of distance (geographic, cultural and institutional), because they generate different types of uncertainties, impact offshore governance choices in different ways. Empirical results confirm that, on the one hand, firms are more likely to respond to internal uncertainties resulting from geographic and cultural distance by leveraging the internal controls and collaboration mechanisms of a captive offshore service center. On the other hand, they tend to respond to external uncertainties resulting from institutional distance by limiting their foreign commitment and leveraging the resources and local experience of third party service providers. Finally, I find that the temporal distance component (time zone difference) of geographical dispersion between onshore and offshore countries plays a dominant role over the spatial distance component.<p><p>The third section then concentrates on the impact of the institutional environment (regulative) on international sourcing activities. To exploit country-specific advantages, firms that source activities from abroad are forced to integrate the institutional environment into the choice not only of host-country, but also of governance model for their offshore activities. Considering inefficient institutions as drivers of transaction costs, this conceptual paper explores the impact of the host-country regulative environment in the interdependent decisions of country selection and governance model (captive or outsourcing) in firms’ global sourcing strategies. I consider two classes of assets: transferred assets for knowledge/information flows, and local assets sourced from the host location. I show that each class involves specific institutional risks for offshoring practices. In turn, because of the different institutional exposures of the captive model and the outsourced one, the institutional risks associated with transferred and local assets have different implications for the choice of governance model. Firms react to institutional risks relative to transferred assets by internalizing their activity, but they bypass inefficient institutions for local assets using outsourcing. Based on the interaction of the institutional risks relative to each class of assets, I then obtain sufficient conditions that give the firm-optimal combinations of country selection and governance model.<p><p>The last section studies how firm-level and country-level risks affect the scope of the process operated in the foreign unit. To prevent appropriation hazard for proprietary content, firms choose a particular disaggregation of the value chain. We argue that, in response to the lack of control offered by internalization and the lack of protection provided by host-country institutions for protecting proprietary content, firms reduce the scope of their activities. In other words, they exploit existing complementarities between the tasks of their value chain using a higher disaggregation of their process and therefore reducing appropriation value for outsiders. Based on a sample of 750 international sourcing projects, regression results on the scope of offshore activities confirm that firms prefer to source discrete tasks rather than entire processes when they lack the protection of internalization and external institutions. In addition, experience modifies these relationships. On the one hand, inexperienced firms do not rely on this slicing mechanism to prevent the loss of control implied by an outsourcing model. On the other hand, the effect of weak institutional protection is perceived as more stringent for inexperienced firms. When host-country institutions are deficient, these firms, compared to the experienced ones, have a higher propensity to operate discrete tasks rather than entire processes.<p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

戰後台灣的政治安定，立基於經濟發展，經濟發展取決於貿易傳動。在全球化的時代，經貿是台灣積極串聯世界、爭取生存茁壯的關鍵樞紐；對四面環海的台灣而言，能源及原物料之進口與轉化後財貨之對外貿易，全賴於海運實踐，台灣以一個海島型經濟型態「不斷向世界市場擴張」的過程中，國際海運是國家經濟與世界市場的實質聯結。國際海運因而成為台灣迎向全球與經貿發展的生命線，政軍安定的守護神。 本文主要的目的，在探討戰後(1950~2005)我國國際海運政策的治理模式與治理政策。台灣四面環海，具有發展國際海運的地理優勢，比較世界各國的發展，台灣地區的國際海運經營與發展，在世界上一直佔有相當重要的地位。然而，近年來，由於中國大陸的崛起，台灣則基於自身的考量，執行「戒急用忍」政策，遲遲不開放兩岸通航與協商航商西進，使得台灣的經濟優勢逐漸流失，國輪航商之經營環境也隨之惡化，本研究藉由歷史與結構的研究途徑，從戰後我國國際海運發展的歷史脈絡與結構變遷，就其治理模式與治理策略進行深入的探討。 除了經由文獻探討中，檢視我國國際海運政策的變革之外，進一步與我國國際海運的公經理人、學者與業者等共三十位專業人士，進行實證的訪問調查，獲得第一手的資料，然後與文獻分析所得相互驗證，進而歸納成結論，並就我國國際海運政策的治理模式與治理策略，提出建言。 / Abstract: Comparing with the development of other countries, water-surrounded Taiwan has to build up its international shipping industry to facilitate international trade and therefore stabilize its polity through economic development. Due to the geographic privilege, Taiwan also has its strength of developing international shipping for linking the national economy and the world market. The objective of this study is to explore the governance mode and strategies of Taiwan’s international shipping policy after the World War II. This study investigated the relationships among international politics, macroeconomic and international trade, government policy, and industry environment for the international shipping policy. In addition to literature review, this study interviewed public managers, scholars and industrial professionals to empirically collect the experienced data by “in-depth interview.” Through the integrated means, this study concludes that Taiwan’s international shipping policy has played an important role for developing the industry in each stage of Taiwan’s development on economy and international trade, whilst the government in Taiwan should seek more practical governance modes and strategies to cope with the challenges to come.