A clean and affordable energy source for cooking is deficient in developing countries. People rely on fuels that contribute to environmental, social and health problems.Biogas is an alternative energy source and an increased investment in small-scale biogas production can in several developing countries be found. Several projects have started to use the technology in developing countries because of the benefits with biogas. Some cases in the establishment of biogas plants have succeeded and some have not. The study is a literature review supplemented by two field studies.

A clean and affordable energy source for cooking is deficient in developing countries. People rely on fuels that contribute to environmental, social and health problems.Biogas is an alternative energy source and an increased investment in small-scale biogas production can in several developing countries be found. Several projects have started to use the technology in developing countries because of the benefits with biogas. Some cases in the establishment of biogas plants have succeeded and some have not. The study is a literature review supplemented by two field studies.

During its lifetime, a road goes through a number of different stages; pre-study,inquiry of the road, work plan, documenting stage, building stage and operatingstage. The operating stage is the one that takes the longest time and costs themost. Those have a tendency of becoming unnecessarily high because the projectengineers don?t always take the management and maintenance prerequisites intoconditions.To decrease the management and maintenance costs, the Swedish RoadAdministration SouthEast has been in need of a work procedure that makes theroaddesign engineers take the management and maintenance of the road intoconsideration. This shall be achieved by a checklist where the most commondesigns that lead to increased management- and maintenance costs are compiledand listed.Through interviews with project leaders in management, the most commonproblems have been identified, analyzed and summarized under the headlineswinter-road, vegetation, road equipment and road designs.To elucidate the problem from several points of view, interviews wereimplemented with project leaders in investment and roaddesign engineers.

The Swedish stock-market gives investors an opportunity to benefit from the global growth while financing companies invests and contributes to a socio-economic development. Parallel to the ownership of the funds also follows a responsibility as companies in the funds affect society and the environment. The growth of savings in funds, combined with an increased focus on sustainability has developed SRI (socially responsible investment). Therefore it is interesting to examine whether responsibility is an exception, which only concerns SRI-funds or a general principle, which includes the whole Swedish stock-market.The results of the survey makes it clear that all the Swedish major banks actively works to integrate sustainability within the respective bank's business to achieve a more sustainable financial system. Thus concludes the investigation that responsible investments are a general principle on the Swedish mutual stock-market.How responsibility is integrated in fund management differ between the banks.

This thesis explores how the concept of ?legal corruption? manifests itself within the European Investment Bank with a modern approach to the theoretical understanding of anticorruption efforts. This approach conceptualises the idea of complementing theories based on contextual applicability rather than focusing on their competing qualities. The European Investment Bank (EIB), as the world?s largest multilateral lender, is an underexplored yet vital organ of the European Union, which has recently faced criticism for its alleged lack of transparency and dubious application of policy.

A clean and affordable energy source for cooking is deficient in developing countries. People rely on fuels that contribute to environmental, social and health problems.Biogas is an alternative energy source and an increased investment in small-scale biogas production can in several developing countries be found. Several projects have started to use the technology in developing countries because of the benefits with biogas. Some cases in the establishment of biogas plants have succeeded and some have not. The study is a literature review supplemented by two field studies.

Foreign invested SMEs have recently become increasingly interested in China. The enterprises are in this report categorized as second wave companies since they follow the footsteps of previous pioneers, of which mostly were larger companies. The ambitions of the SMEs are either to sell products on the ever expanding Chinese market or to utilize the potential of low cost production for global markets. The existing literature is fragmented and solely based on the experience of larger companies. We believe that SMEs are facing new and different challenges, and thus a new generic theoretical frame work is desirable.

To build high-rise buildings made of timber has for long been limited by national laws, due to the lack of knowledge in engineering solutions. Frame structures made of wood has for a long time been associated with major fire hazards and consequently lower safety and this connection is still being made today. The increased environmental awareness in recent years has contributed to the exploitation of indigenous building materials, including wood from our own Swedish forests and has become increasingly common. Increased knowledge about how structures behave in fire and how they can be protected in order to achieve safe timber structures has resulted in a growing interest in these structures in the construction industry. Research in the area is constantly updated and new laws allow any number of storeys in wooden buildings in Sweden as long as the performance requirements are fulfilled.The main part of this work has involved calculations of the fire resistance and load bearing capacity of floor and wall constructions.

The interest for venture capital within the financial sector in Sweden has, according to earlier studies, been seen as a growing occurrence. Especially for what is known as informal venture capital. In modern times, private investors who engage themselves in small, unlisted companies, providing informal venture capital are to be known as business angels. They close equity gaps on the financial market by contribute financial capital to start-ups and are therefore an important participant on today?s market.

AbstractDate              2009-06-07Level             Master thesis in Information Technology and Business Administration, 15 hp, EIK024Authors        Anna Karlsson, akn05009@student.mdh.se                      Lena-Maria Lindström, llm05002@student.mdh.seTutor            Peter EkmanTitle              IT Governance with an IT investment focusKeywords     IT Governance, IT investments, IT decisions Problem       To control and manage IT and IT functions in the organization has been a big challenge for many businesses for a long time. In order to make the management of IT more efficient IT Governance is needed. If the organization is going to be successful IT Governance is necessary and this type of governance enables a more effective use of IT that supports the business and its operations. The problem questions for this thesis are: How is the company?s IT Governance built up? How are decisions regarding the company?s IT investments taken? How is the connection between the company?s IT investments and the company?s IT Governance?Purpose        The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze how a company?s IT Governance is built up and how the company uses IT Governance to reach the desired results from the IT investments.Method        The thesis is a qualitative study.

This paper investigates whether the traditional accrual based trading strategy first documented by Sloan (1996) can be refined using fundamental analysis. Specifically, this is done by implementing the composite signal F_SCORE introduced by Piotroski (2000) to identify financially strong or weak firms. We find that by applying both investment models simultaneously, in a model we call P_KOMB, the mean market-adjusted return earned by an investor exploiting the accrual anomaly can be increased by 14.8% annually. This is achieved by taking a long position in strong firms (as defined by the composite signal) in the lowest accrual portfolio, while an offsetting short position is taken in weak firms in the highest accrual portfolio, repeated annually between 1997 and 2007. Consistent with prior studies, positive market-adjusted returns can be attained through assessment of accruals as well as key value drivers found in historical financial data.

Title: A study about the purchasing process of ITLevel: Master thesis in Information Technology and Business Administration, 15 hp, EIK024Authors: Emelie Johanson and Mikael LindströmTutor: Peter Ekman, Mälardalens HögskolaKeywords: IT-investment, purchase, decisionProblem: In the last decades the amount of IT investments increased and has become an important resource within most organizations. IT gives the ability to compete and could also be a condition for many to be able to compete. In different businesses it could vary in where they put their focus when they choose an IT investment. This thesis examines how the purchase process of IT looks. How does processes differs in a bigger company versus a smaller company? From these two perspectives this study examined these research questions: Who makes the decisions whether or not an IT solution should be purchased? What aspects decide when companies are to choose between different IT solutions? Where in the purchase process do problems usually emerge?Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze the purchasing process of IT from a business perspective.

The main purpose of this essay is to investigate if Latvia´s pattern of trade has become more similar to the mature market economies, after Latvia´s independence 1991.Today, the intra-industry trade (IIT) dominates the trade of mature market economies. One of the pioneers of intra-industrial trade is Paul Krugman, who was the first to emphasize the importance "of scale and consumers' desire for variety" in explaining the basis for modern commerce. Customers get more variety and usually cheaper goods when the market gets bigger. I mainly use the modern trade theories to explain the trade pattern in Latvia. To measure how Latvia has developed its intra-industry trade, and thereby is approaching the mature market economies´ trade pattern, I use the Grubel-Lloyd index (GL-index).

Abstrakt -  As energy prices rise, energy-saving in buildings is becoming increasingly important. By applying different construction and installation technologies, to new buildings the energy consumption can be reduced effectively, compared to similar existing buildings. These technical measures are often an investment in the long term and will reduce energy costs significantly. The purpose of this report is to show how to reduce energy consumption in a small house. It is presented in this report that both building's technical saving arrangements (the sealing of a building) and an installation technical arrangement (changing from the F-system to the FTX-system) would reduce energy consumption in newly built detached houses, if compared with a similar existing house but without these technical measures. The report presents also detailed calculations showing how much energy an existing 2-storey house, built in the year 2007 in Eskilstuna, consumes and how much energy would be saved if these corrective measures were applied to a new building. It is also reported how much money would be saved each year over a 10 year period if the measures were applied. The results show that both solutions are a good investment in the reduction of energy consumption and hence the cost involved. Keywords: energy, heat energy, infiltration, FTX-system, free temperature effectively. .

An increase interest of new methods and tools has begun to grow in the real estate business, this new trend causes an increase in new programs that aim to simplify processes of energy-efficiency and environmental issues.After consulting with Björn Alsmark from Bjerking AB, an architect and engineering company, we made a decision that the Degree Project is going to examine the program IES (Integrated Environmental Solutions) with some integrations from Revit Architecture application.To be able to examine IES, we got access to a completed project from Bjerking. The project is a nursery school in Uppsala. An application has been handed in from Bjerking to make this project to a Green Building-certificated project. According to Bjerking own calculations (with the energy-calculation program Enorm), the consumption of energy of the nursery school is 48 percent lesser than required by BBR.An evaluation of IES and Enorm has been made with an aim to compare these two programs and find out if IES is an appropriate program to replace Enorm. Does Enorm or IES come up to BBR´s recommendations?The Degree Project cover 15 ECT, that required several adjusting and delimitations, and the study sketch ended with a literature study.After finishing the study sketch the modeling of the nursery school began.