Abstract
This thesis analyzes the extensively debated sovereign wealth fund market. The objectives are to
widen the academic research on the topic by performing a market analysis and investigate whether the
sovereign wealth funds are a potential threat to the countries receiving capital from the sovereign
wealth funds. This is done by using a built-up theoretical framework covering three core areas of
concern regarding the sovereign wealth funds - investment strategy, transparency and corporate
governance. The empirical part constitutes of three sovereign wealth fund case studies (ICD in Dubai,
Temasek in Singapore and the Norwegian Government Pension Fund – Global) which represents the
characteristics of the overall market well. The market analysis shows that there are only a few funds
which are big enough to be a potential concern to the receiving countries. Furthermore, there seems to
be a correlation between democracy and transparency in the funds and the importance of the funds
differs wildly among the countries. The conclusion from analyzing the SWFs potential threat is that
there is one area where the SWFs may cause future reel concern. This is when there are clear corporate
governance issues in emergent market funds, where the goal of the fund at least partly is to promote
domestic growth. If all these factors exist, the fund’s influence in foreign portfolio companies could be
used to unfairly transferring knowledge and technology to be used by the fund’s government or ruler.
As the sovereign wealth fund market still is growing rapidly, an important area of future research
would be to analyze the two funds which currently are starting their operations, the National Welfare
Fund in Russia and the China Investm ...