He posits that this was mainly caused by a shift in the location of the Swedish MNCs' various production stages.
Earlier, most of the value added was produce in the parent company and many affiliates took over some of the more skill-intensive parts of the production process, while parents specialized in simpler, raw material based operations at lower stages in of the value added chain.
Andersson also examined firm level data for the periods 1974-1978 and 1986-1990 in a regression analysis, and found a significant negative relation between labor productivity growth in parents and increases in the share of intermediate goods in the parent's total exports to their EC affiliates.
From this, he concluded that FDI was leading to an increasing specialization in raw material based production with relatively low value added.
Similarly, looking at the employment structure in Swedish MNCs, a government assessment (SOU 1983) found that increasing foreign production in Swedish MNCs was apparently accompanied by lower skill requirements in home based production already in the early 1980s, which was hard to explain unless the production stages requiring higher skills were located outside Sweden