The purpose of this thesis is to examine Turkey&rsquo / s export competitiveness in the first 15 members of the European Union (EU-15 market) against non-EU-15 competitors. The study covers the recent period since the Customs Union agreement signed between Turkey and the EU at the end of 1995. Turkey&rsquo / s position in the EU-15 market is analyzed in detail by focusing upon major dimensions of export competitiveness / such as &lsquo / export similarity&rsquo / , &lsquo / export diversification&rsquo / , &lsquo / intensive and extensive margins&rsquo / , &lsquo / revealed comparative advantages&rsquo / , &lsquo / dynamic market positioning&rsquo / and &lsquo / competitive threat&rsquo / . We use various indexes from the literature and develop some original indexes as our own contributions. In terms the subject-matter, time dimension and data-detail of our study, all indexes utilized in this thesis are applied to Turkey&rsquo / s case for the first time. Examining price and quantity differences across countries and within each industry, Turkey&rsquo / s competitive position in the EU-15 market is analyzed as compared to 30 countries for more than 3000 export-product groups classified according to their technological characteristics. Based on the results, suggestions at the levels of countries, products and technological categories are made for Turkey to improve its export strategy in terms of seizing the existing but unexploited opportunities in the EU-15 market against its competitors. Policy possibilities are also discussed for directing Turkey&rsquo / s competitiveness towards higher value-added products in a rational and strategic way.

The global semiconductor industry had gone through a consecutive years of prosperity in the 1990s due to the strong demand in personal computer as well as the enormous internet investiment. Even more, it gained an eruptive growth in years 1999 and 2000. The semiconductor fabrication companies¡¦ capital spending in new equipment segment grew year by year. The equipment suppliers¡¦ revenue and gross margin had then set record high. However, combined the internet bubbled in 2000 with the shortage of killer application, the chip makers¡¦ capital spending had thereafter dramatically slowdown for years and hence seriously impacted the equipment suppliers¡¦ financial performance. Ever after the great recession in year 2000, the equipment suppliers have been taking steps to alleviate the industry downturns¡¦ impact in their financial report. Meanwhile, the companies have also identified ways to further grow their business. Besides, the semiconductor industry has been introducing advanced nanomanufacturing technologies which demand huge resource commitment as well as capital investiment. The chip makers have therefore urged the equipment suppliers to assist them in area about cost reduction and productivity improvement. This study takes the world biggest semiconductor frabication equipment maker, Applied Materials, as an example, to investigate the company¡¦s strategically responsivenesses against the business cycles, the current industry environment and its desire in business growth. The conclusions are: 1)Applied Materials has been taking joint ventures, outsourcing and global development center establishments to reduce its operation cost. It had also entered the fab service market to create a new niche. 2)In response to the customers¡¦ demand in productivity improvement , Applied Materials has been activating differentiation strategies to develop high-productivity products. It has also been performing Continuous Improvement Plans (CIP) to further reduce its products¡¦ Cost Of Ownership (COO) to meet the customers¡¦ requirement in cost reduction. 3)The equipement suppliers have been conducting related constrained diversification strategies to extend their business scope. They mostly used the Mergers & Acquisitions to enter the new markets. 4)The strategy effectiveness (in view of the shareholders¡¦ return on investment), is positively related to its consistency with the company¡¦s core competencies. In other word, the higher the consistency is, the better the ROI will be. Keyword: Internal Environment Analysis, External Environment Analysis, Strategic Responsiveness, Diversification Strategy, Differentiation Strategy, Mergers & Acquisitions

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Today, the global market is a fast expanding environment. There are more and more companies that go abroad to compete with companies from all over the world. The barriers between countries have been lowered and trade is encouraged. Therefore, international expansion is an important factor for many companies. The purpose of this dissertation is to study the effect international expansion has on firm performance. Since there is limited previous research within the field of international expansion and performance done on Swedish companies this dissertation tries to fill that gap.   The study is performed on listed Swedish companies. Several factors are used to measure the international expansion and performance of the companies. The relationships between international expansion and firm performance were positive when international expansion was measured as Number of Countries and Market Commitment. When international expansion was measured as Foreign Assets and as the GL-Index (Gerlofstig-Lindstrand Index), support was given to a positive relationship. The relationship between Foreign Board and firm performance as well as Foreign HR (Human Resources) and firm performance was to some extent supported. The remaining two measures of international expansion were Foreign Assets and International ownership. These measures showed no supported relationships between international expansion and firm performance. To conclude, the results of the study indicated that there are some support for a relationship between international expansion and firm performance for listed Swedish companies.   This study contributes to the lack of research on the effect of international expansion on performance of Swedish companies. Swedish managers can use the conclusions drawn from the study as guidelines for international expansion.

The thesis studies the impact of the financial support of the Environmental and Rural Devel-opment Programme of 2000-2006 on farm diversification and other activities in the rural areas of the Västra Götaland County for the period 2000-2005. Furthermore, it analyses if diver-sification within the firms has improved efficiency due to economies of scope. The statistical data of this study is based on a telephone survey of a total population of 50 firms that have received financial support for diversification, within the County of Västra Götaland. The response rate of the telephone survey was 80 per cent of the total popula-tion. The statistical analysis is based on chi-square and logit models in combination with a descriptive analysis in order to test the hypothesis of the thesis. Therefore, the empirical analysis has both a quantitative and a qualitative character. The result of the study shows that about 87.7 per cent of the surveyed firms have diversi-fied their economic activities during the years 2000-2005. Firms owned by women tend to have diversified to a larger extent compared to men. Further, women show a tendency to be more successful with a higher degree of diversification within the service sector com-pared to men. The enterprises within the production and refinement sectors have, on the other hand, a propensity to focus on traditional agricultural production despite the diversi-fication. A majority of the interviewed firms have received benefits from scope economies, which imply that the firms utilise joint production with shared inputs. The scope econo-mies existed among studied firms previous to the support and there are no significant changes in the economies of scope due to the financial support. Overall, the financial sup-port seems to have had a positive impact on the firms’ economic situation since none of the studied firms has experienced a decline in employment, turnover or income.

There are several authors Markowitz (1991), Elton and Gruber (1997) that discuss the main issues that an investor faces when investing, for example how to allocate resources among the variety of different securities. These issues have led to the discussion of portfolio theories, especially the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), which is developed by Nobel Prize awarded economist Harry Markowitz. This theory is the philosophical opposite of tradi-tional asset picking. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if an investor can apply MPT in order to achieve a higher return than investing in an index portfolio. Combining a strong portfolio that beats the market in the longrun would be the ultimate goal for most investors. The theories that are used to analyze the problem and the empirical findings provide the essential concepts such as standard deviation, risk and return of the portfolio. Further, diversification, correlation and covariance are used to achieve the optimal risky portfolio. There will be a walk-through of the MPT, with the efficient frontier as the graphical guide to express the optimal risky portfolio. The methodology constitutes as the frame for the thesis. The quantitative method is used since the data input is gathered from historical data. This thesis is based on existing theories, and the deductive approach aims to use these theories in order to accomplish a valid and accurate analysis. The benchmark that is used to compare the results from the portfolio is the Stockholm stock exchange OMX 30. This index mimics and reflects the market as a whole. The portfolio will be reweighed at a preplanned schedule, each quarter to constantly obtain an optimal risky portfolio. The finding from this study indicates that the actively managed portfolio outperforms the passive benchmark during the selected timeframe. The outcome someway differs when evaluating the risk adjusted result and becomes less significant. The risk adjusted result does not provide any strong evidence for a greater return than index. Finally, with this finding, the authors can conclude by stating that an actively managed optimal risky portfolio with guidance of the MPT can surpass the OMX 30 within the selected timeframe.

<p>This dissertation consists of two essays in international macroeconomics. In the first essay I explore the role of portfolio diversification in explaining the distribution of foreign investment across countries. I do so by adopting a portfolio allocation approach to risk, that is widely used in empirical finance, to complement more traditional analyses of foreign capital flows across countries. I capture the portfolio diversification motive by a measure of country-specific riskiness, "covariance risk", which I construct as how countries' growth rates covary with the stochastic discount factor of a representative international investor. The idea is to capture the extent to which investments in a foreign economy provide a hedge against the investor's overall risk. My key new empirical finding is a strong and significant correlation between this new measure of country riskiness and foreign investment allocations. Less risky countries, i.e countries whose growth rates are more highly correlated with the investor's stochastic discount factor, receive larger investment shares than more risky countries. I interpret this result as evidence that investors do take into account diversification opportunities not only for portfolio investment decisions but also for foreign direct investment decisions. My empirical results confirm the theoretical predictions of standard portfolio allocation models.</p><p>In the second essay I explore the business cycle regularities of low-income countries in comparison to those observed in middle- and high-income countries. The data reveals several distinguishing features of the business cycle in low-income countries compared to the other two income groups: acyclical trade balances; highest volatility of consumption relative to output; highest volatility of debt; highest average debt-to-output ratio and lowest average savings ratio; significant negative correlation between domestic saving rates and the net foreign asset position. My main finding is that a small open economy model with both trend and transitory shocks to productivity, and varying intertemporal elasticity of substitution, motivated by subsistence consumption theories, can be used to account for the distinguishing features of the three income groups. The theoretical model shows that while both permanent shocks and transitory fluctuations around the trend are important sources of fluctuations in low-income countries, temporary shocks play a predominant role. In comparison to the other two income groups the volatility of the temporary shock for the low-income countries is more than three times higher than that for the high-income group and twice as large as that for the middle-income group. The same pattern holds for the permanent shock.</p> / Dissertation

Die vorliegende Broschüre gehört zu einer Trilogie im Rahmen des Dialogprozesses »Landwirtschaft in Sachsen hat Zukunft«, der im Jahr 2007 von Akteuren aus den verschiedensten Bereichen der sächsischen Landwirtschaft mit Vertretern der Forschung und der Verwaltung ins Leben gerufen wurde. Ziel war es, Strategien zu finden, wie sich Unternehmen der Branche an absehbare Veränderungen von natürlichen, wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen anpassen können. In acht Fachforen erfolgte über eine Analyse von bestehenden Rahmenbedingungen die Ableitung von Handlungserfordernissen für den einzelnen Betrieb, aber auch für Politik und branchenübergreifend den gesamten Sektor. Verschiedene Lösungsmöglichkeiten wurden im Rahmen von Projekten gesucht. Die Ergebnisse der Arbeit bis 2012 werden in den drei Broschüren vorgestellt.

University of Macau / Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences

This paper examines the impact of USD and EUR exchange rates on the Swedish stock market performance for different economic sectors over a time period of ten years (2003-2013). The growing integration between foreign exchange markets and stock markets with the wide spread use of hedging and diversification policies made it necessary to test the degree of impact these two distinct markets share between each other. Number of studies, were done studying the relationship between the exchange rates and stock performance combining and comparing different economies and currencies. Nevertheless, research gap prevailed when it came at the point of the studying the relationship on Swedish stock and foreign exchange market. The research was conducted with the quantitative method. Initially we have tested how the performance of Swedish stock market is correlated with the return of the USD and EUR in different economic sectors over different time periods. Later, we try to investigate if there is any spillover effect flows from the exchange market to the Swedish stock market. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient and GARCH (1,1) model were applied to study the correlation and spillover effect between the exchange and stock return respectively. Our empirical study showed that there is very low correlation which is statistically insignificant between the two different markets. Correlations were found to be significantly varied across the different economic sectors in different time periods. Moreover empirical study supported that the spillover effect exists and showed that movement of exchange rates will affect the future performance of stock market. The significant conclusions were that USD and EUR can be used as portfolio diversification and during the volatile exchange market, investors should diversify or hedge their risk domestically and vice versa. The implications of this finding is particularly very important for the portfolio managers when devising their hedging policies and diversifying their portfolios in order to minimize their unsystematic risk.