<p>The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether the concept of permanent establishment, as defined in Article 5 of the OECD Model Tax Convention on Income and Capital, is applicable to electronic commerce and if so whether the current definition is able to appropriately deal with the challenges of electronic commerce.</p><p>In 2003, the OECD added a new section to the Commentary on the Model Tax Convention on Article 5. The new section is a clarification on the application of the permanent establishment definition in electronic commerce.</p><p>The current definition of permanent establishment in the Model Tax Convention relies on the physical presence of a foreign corporation as the threshold for source taxation. While the current definition, <em>prima facie</em>, might be applicable on electronic commerce, the highly mobile nature of electronic commerce might affect the current revenue distribution equilibrium between states.</p>

<p>The harmonization within EC Company Law has been relativley successful. Despite its relative success; important differences still remains in European company law.</p><p>The freedom of establishment itself, and the ECJ’s interpretation of the freedom provides European companies with a substantial cross-border mobility. As a consequence of this mobility, together with the differences in national legislation; mandatory rules in company law can be easily evaded. A typical example of this is that a Swedish enterprise, by running their business through a British private limited company, can escape the Swedish legislation on capital contributions when forming a company with limited liability for its members. These rules are thereby undermined.</p><p>The fact that these, otherwise mandatory, rules can be evaded should result in a questioning of their existence. The main purpose of rules on minimal capital contributions is to safeguard the interests of the creditors of the company. The analysis in this thesis shows that the Swedish legal capital regime is very unlikley to fulfill its purpose. The alternative, English company law, can in various aspects be seen as more efficient.</p> / <p>Den gemenskapsrättsliga harmoniseringsprocessen har på bolagsrättens område varit relativt framgångsrik. Trots detta går det i dagsläget inte att tala om någon konform europeisk bolagsrätt. Betydande skillnader kvarstår mellan de nationella bolagsrättsliga regelverken.</p><p>Den EG-rättsliga etableringsfriheten, och EG-domstolens tolkning av densamma, innebär att de europeiska företagen ges ett relativt stort mått av gränsöverskridande rörelsefrihet. En följd av denna mobilitet tillsammans med skillnaderna i de nationella regelverken är att tvingande nationell bolagsrättslig lagstiftning relativt</p><p>enkelt kan kringgås. Ett typexempel på detta är att svenska företagare, genom att bedriva sin verksamhet i ett engelskt aktiebolag, kan undgå det svenska kravet på tillskjutande av ett minsta aktiekapital vid bildandet av ett privat aktiebolag. Det svenska kapitalkravet kan därmed sägas vara underminerat.</p><p>Blott det faktum att det svenska kapitalkravet underminerats innebär att dess existens bör ifrågasättas. Syftet med kapitalkravet är främst att skydda borgenärernas intressen i bolagen. Mot bakgrund av vad som framkommer i denna uppsats kan det svenska kapitalkravets effektivitet betvivlas. Alternativet, den engelska bolagsrätten, kan ur en rad aspekter sägas vara mer ändamålsenlig.</p>

<p>Lichens are, in most cases, sensitive to anthropogenic factors such as air pollution, global warming, forestry and fragmentation. Two studies are included in this thesis. The first is an evaluation of the importance of old oak for the rare epiphytic lichen Cliostomum corrugatum (Ach.) Fr. This study analysed whether C. corrugatum was limited by dispersal or restricted to tree stands with an unbroken continuity or the substrate old oaks. The results provide evidence that the investigated five populations in Östergötland, Sweden, of C. corrugatum exhibit substantial gene flow, an effective dispersal and a small genetic variation between the sites. Most of the genetic variation was within the populations. Thus, C. corrugatum is more dependent of the substrate old oaks, rather than limited by dispersal. The second study investigated possible range shift of some common macrolichens, due to global warming, from 64 sites in southern Sweden comparing the two years 1986 and 2003. The centroid of three lichen species had moved a significant distance, all in a north east direction: Hypogymnia physodes (L.) Nyl. and Vulpicida pinastri (Scop.) J.-E. Mattsson and M. J. Lai on the tree species Juniperus communis L. (50 and 151 km, respectively) and H. physodes on Pinus sylvestris L. (41 km). Considering also the non-significant cases, there is strong evidence for a prevailing NE direction of centroid movement.</p>

From the Proceedings of the 1977 Meetings of the Arizona Section - American Water Resources Assn. and the Hydrology Section - Arizona Academy of Science - April 15-16, 1977, Las Vegas, Nevada / A new minimum tillage implement, "the land imprinter," has been designed and fabricated, and is currently being tested. Its design is based on water infiltration control theory developed during the past decade. The land imprinter was developed primarily for establishing vegetation in barren land areas in semiarid and arid regions of the world. It simultaneously forms interconnected downslope and cross - slope corrugations that shed water and then infiltrate it precisely where vegetative growth is to be encouraged. This controlled short distance routing of water along short waterways into small reservoirs makes more rainwater available for seed germination and seedling establishment, and less water available for loss by surface runoff and evaporation. The imprinter has only one moving part, in the form of a massive compound roller and central axle which turn together as a rigid assembly during operation. The compound roller consists of two imprint capsules which are linked together on the axle shaft by an axle pulling clamp. The core of the imprint capsule is a hollow steel cylinder (1-m diameter and 1-m long) fabricated from 1.27-cm steel plate. A variety of imprint geometries are formed by welding short lengths of specially -cut steel angles (1.27 cm x 15.24 cm x 15.24 cm) to the outer surface of the cylindrical core. Ten imprint capsules with distinctly different geometric patterns of steel angles have been developed and fabricated. By pairing these capsules in as many ways as possible, 45 different geometric patterns can be imprinted. The patterns of steel angles perform a number of different tillage functions including (1) brush and soft rock crushing, (2) brush and rock imbedding, (3) runoff inducing and directing, (4) infiltration inducing and directing, (5) biomass concentrating, (6) seedbed forming, (7) surface and vertical mulching, (8) wind and water erosion controlling, (9) surface compacting, and (10) surface trenching and pitting. Advantages of the land imprinter as compared with alternative tillage methods include (1) greater stability, diversity, complexity, and precision of surface geometric patterns; (2) better control of point infiltration, runoff, erosion, and evaporation; and (3) greater utility in brush -covered, steeply - sloping, deeply gullied, and rocky land. The land imprinter should have widespread utility in both range and croplands because of its unique ability to mold runoff -watered seedbeds that increase the probability of seed germination and seedling establishment.

Tidigare studier visar att Afrika är en växande marknad med möjligheter för svenska företag, men det är en marknad som innebär risker. De svenska företagen har idag en stark närvaro med ett gott rykte och bidrar med kunskap och kvalitet. Trots stora naturtillgångar och ekonomisk tillväxt råder en ojämn inkomstfördelning med fortsatt utbredd fattigdom och underutvecklad infrastruktur. De afrikanska ländernas egna företagare är en viktig del i deras ekonomiska tillväxt. För att skapa vidare utveckling bör de afrikanska ledarna ta större ansvar för den unga arbetskraften. Studiens syfte var att studera hur, var och varför svenska företag har etablerat sig på den afrikanska marknaden och se om och hur etableringen skiljer sig åt för de utvalda företagen. Studien ville även försöka ta reda på vilka ekonomiska och kulturella problem och framgångar etableringen inneburit och om ett socialt engagemang är viktigt för företagen. Huvudfrågorna var: Vilka marknadsföringsstrategier använder företagen, hur handskas de med kulturpåverkan och är socialt engagemang en möjlighet? Genom bland annat djupgående intervjuer med svenska företag har information samlats in om deras etableringar i Afrika. De marknadsföringsstrategier som huvudsakligen används är att anlita en lokalt etablerad återförsäljare, etablera ett dotterbolag eller ett tillfälligt projektkontor. Företagen är medvetna om kulturskillnaderna och det är viktigt för dem med en politisk stabilitet samt de ser ett stort värde i en lokal branschkompetens hos partnern och lokalbefolkningen. Idag blir det allt vanligare för företagen att delta i biståndsfinansierade projekt där lokala yrkesutbildningar startas i de afrikanska länderna. / Previous studies show that Africa is an emerging market with opportunities for Swedish companies, but it is a market that involves risks. Swedish companies have a strong presence with a good reputation and contribute with their knowledge and quality. Despite vast natural resources and economic growth there is an uneven distribution of income, with continued widespread poverty and underdeveloped infrastructure. The local domestic companies in African countries are an important part of their economic growth. To create further development the African leaders should take more responsibility for the young workforce. The study's purpose was to study how, where and why Swedish companies have established themselves in the African market and see if and how the establishment is different for the companies in this study. The study would also try to find out the economic and cultural problems and successes the establishment brought and if a social responsibility is important for companies. The main questions were: What marketing strategies the companies use, how do they deal with cultural influences and is social responsibility an opportunity? By including in-depth interviews with Swedish companies information has been collected about their establishments in Africa. The marketing strategies which are mainly used are to hire a locally established dealer, establish a subsidiary or a temporary project office. The companies are aware of cultural differences and it is important for them with political stability, and they see a great value in a local industry expertise of the partner and locals. Today it is increasingly common for companies to participate in aid-financed projects where local vocational education is started in the African countries.

This thesis addresses new security challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT). The current transition from legacy Internet to Internet of Things leads to multiple changes in its communication paradigms. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) initiated this transition by introducing unattended wireless topologies, mostly made of resource constrained nodes, in which radio spectrum therefore ceased to be the only resource worthy of optimization. Today's Machine to Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things architectures further accentuated this trend, not only by involving wider architectures but also by adding heterogeneity, resource capabilities inconstancy and autonomy to once uniform and deterministic systems. The heterogeneous nature of IoT communications and imbalance in resources capabilities between IoT entities make it challenging to provide the required end-to-end secured connections. Unlike Internet servers, most of IoT components are characterized by low capabilities in terms of both energy and computing resources, and thus, are unable to support complex security schemes. The setup of a secure end-to-end communication channel requires the establishment of a common secret key between both peers, which would be negotiated relying on standard security key exchange protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) Handshake or Internet Key Exchange (IKE). Nevertheless, a direct use of existing key establishment protocols to initiate connections between two IoT entities may be impractical because of the technological gap between them and the resulting inconsistencies in their cryptographic primitives. The issue of adapting existing security protocols to fulfil these new challenges has recently been raised in the international research community but the first proposed solutions failed to satisfy the needs of resource-constrained nodes. In this thesis, we propose novel collaborative approaches for key establishment designed to reduce the requirements of existing security protocols, in order to be supported by resource-constrained devices. We particularly retained TLS handshake, Internet key Exchange and HIP BEX protocols as the best keying candidates fitting the end-to-end security requirements of the IoT. Then we redesigned them so that the constrained peer may delegate its heavy cryptographic load to less constrained nodes in neighbourhood exploiting the spatial heterogeneity of IoT nodes. Formal security verifications and performance analyses were also conducted to ensure the security effectiveness and energy efficiency of our collaborative protocols. However, allowing collaboration between nodes may open the way to a new class of threats, known as internal attacks that conventional cryptographic mechanisms fail to deal with. This introduces the concept of trustworthiness within a collaborative group. The trustworthiness level of a node has to be assessed by a dedicated security mechanism known as a trust management system. This system aims to track nodes behaviours to detect untrustworthy elements and select reliable ones for collaborative services assistance. In turn, a trust management system is instantiated on a collaborative basis, wherein multiple nodes share their evidences about one another's trustworthiness. Based on an extensive analysis of prior trust management systems, we have identified a set of best practices that provided us guidance to design an effective trust management system for our collaborative keying protocols. This effectiveness was assessed by considering how the trust management system could fulfil specific requirements of our proposed approaches for key establishment in the context of the IoT. Performance analysis results show the proper functioning and effectiveness of the proposed system as compared with its counterparts that exist in the literature

Due to a steady increase in the number of asylum-seekers in Sweden over the past few years, the topic of immigration has generated increased attention. As a consequence, the political parties have recently presented a range of policy changes. Several of the policy proposals addressed the current housing situation for asylum-seekers and refugees. The aim of this master’s thesis is to highlight the areas of asylum immigration policy and housing policy, in an attempt to reveal overlaps and interrelationships which influence the establishment of asylum-seekers and refugees in their host society. By using a comparative discourse analysis, the thesis investigates the concepts of migration and domestic immigrant policies in a European context, focusing on Italy, the United Kingdom and Denmark. This is followed by an in-depth study of Sweden. The Swedish perspective is enriched by qualitative expert interviews and statistical data on migration and housing. The results from the gathered research emphasises the great influence of domestic housing policies have on asylum-seekers and refugees’ establishment. Each analysed country has structural barriers that restrict asylum-seekers and refugees from becoming established on the housing market. These policy barriers operate on different governance levels, which mutually affect each other. In turn, this situation complicates a holistic approach to create an effective immigrant housing policy.

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Dispersal, especially long-distance dispersal, is an important component in many disciplines within biology. Many species are passively dispersed by wind, not least spore-dispersed organisms. In this thesis I investigated the dispersal capacity of bryophytes by studying the colonization patterns from local scales (100 m) to landscape scales (20 km). The dispersal distances were measured from a known source (up to 600 m away) or inferred from a connectivity measure (1–20 km). I introduced acidic clay to measure the colonization rates over one season of a pioneer moss, Discelium nudum (I–III). I also investigated which vascular plants and bryophytes that had colonized limed mires approximately 20–30 years after the first disturbance (IV). Discelium effectively colonized new disturbed substrates over one season. Most spores were deposited up to 50 meters from a source but the relationship between local colonization rates and connectivity increased with distance up to 20 km (I–III). Also calcicolous wetland bryophyte species were good colonizers over similar distances, while vascular plants in the same environment colonized less frequently. Common bryophytes that produce spores frequently were more effective colonizers, while no effect of spore size was detected (IV). A mechanistic model that take into account meteorological parameters to simulate the trajectories for spores of Discelium nudum fitted rather well to the observed colonization pattern, especially if spore release thresholds in wind variation and humidity were accounted for (III). This thesis conclude that bryophytes in open habitats can disperse effectively across landscapes given that the regional spore source is large enough (i.e. are common in the region and produce spores abundantly). For spore-dispersed organisms in open landscapes I suggest that it is often the colonization phase and not the transport that is the main bottle-neck for maintaining populations across landscapes. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defence the following papesr were unpublished and had  a status as follows: Paper 2: Epubl ahead of print; Paper 3: Manuscript; Paper 4: Manuscript</p>

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