The overall aim of the course is to provide you with a theoretical and methodological toolbox for evaluating common environmental and natural resource economics issues, as well as to provide you with knowledge about business economics and sustainability work in companies.
The course is composed of three independent main parts; one larger and two smaller. The larger part consists of environmental and resource economics, and the smaller parts of business economics and environmentally driven business development, respectively. The common ground is economic thinking from different perspectives, but the three parts are not based on each other.
The first part, Business Administration, is focused on the company as an important part of the economic fabric of society, more specifically it is about product costing, bookkeeping, accounting, and corporate finance. The focus is on explaining basic concepts of business administration, on understanding how financial management in companies works, how financial accounting can be used and interpreted in decision-making, and on understanding the basic principles of bookkeeping, accounting, and financing as well as how a company's annual report can be compiled and interpreted.
The second part, environmental and natural resource economics, focuses studies on the economic theory and the theoretical and practical tools used to explain and solve environmental problems in society within the subject area of environmental economics. An important starting point here is to address the dilemma within environmental economics that environmental benefits and environmental costs are often valued to zero when evaluating policy measures or business projects. We focus on methods for making such values visible. This part of the course also contains studies of cost-benefit analysis (CBA), a method for evaluating the economic consequences of policy measures and projects. CBA helps us to analyze and discuss issues regarding, among other things, distribution aspects and goal conflicts. Finally, we study how policy instruments can be used to achieve a more sustainable and efficient use of natural resources.
The third part focusses on sustainability related work in companies and contains studies of definitions, frameworks and tools for sustainable business, as well as concrete examples of business models, and sustainable business in practice. In a group assignment, you will utilise your knowledge by analysing selected companies.