Return to search

Evaluation of the Swedish Trade Council’s Business Opportunity Projects

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of the Business Opportunity Projects (BOPs) that the Swedish Trade Council uses when promoting export for small enterprises. The Business Opportunity Projects have the same type of setup for all offices where the Swedish Trade Council is established and are subsidized by 60 percent from the government. A dataset on firms’ financial state on a ten year basis is used and survey interviews conducted in 2005/06 and 2007/08. From this data three types of methods are used; a calculations on expected values of return; a panel data model and a probit model.The results show that the expected return of one project is around 250 000 SEK and if the project is successful the average return is around 1 000 000 SEK. The governmental return is around 22 times the invested money. The probability of creating business volume directly or indirectly is around 45 percent. It is also shown that the projects have an impact on the export turnover of the participating firms. The effect comes after two years and it increases until four years after the BOP. The interpretation of the exact effect should be made with caution due to estimation issues. The result also indicates that the BOP generates around 1.5 employees on averages.The results show that the participating firms do not have advantage being larger, or being from the middle region of Sweden nor in a specific branch in order to have a successful project. Firms from north part of Sweden that have a slightly smaller chance of having a successful project, if the project is made in Western European offices, the firms have a higher probability to succeed compared to other offices.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-155107
Date January 2010
CreatorsAllerup, Jonas
PublisherUppsala universitet, Nationalekonomiska institutionen
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Page generated in 0.0026 seconds