The thesis deals with the major issues facing the European energy policy: the liberalisation of energy markets, security of supply and combating the climate change. After a short description of the history of this policy comes the explanation why the energy issues have become so important for the EU in recent years (oil thirst of the emerging markets, rise of Putin's Russia, climate change). The next chapter focuses on EU's response to these challenges, focusing on Barroso's Commision agenda. Apart from this, there is an analysis of major stakeholders' reactions concerning the recent legislation (Energy packages). However, the main part of the thesis tries to point at the discrepancies between the "official" policy as pronounced at the EU summits and the actual state of things. Major lagging behind can be found in areas such as the extent to which the external energy policy is successful (relations with Russia), the questionable impacts of subsidising biofuels or the slow implementation of energy market directives.

Since the reform in the 1980s, the Chinese electric power industry has experienced rapid expansion in both capacity and outputs, which is surprising since the industry is still under a plan control. The shortage of supply is a common problem in a plan economy according to the conventional wisdom. But China provides very different experience that challenges the wisdom. Why? This thesis attempts to understand why the plan-controlled industry can achieve such rapid growth over a short period of time. The study pursues its investigation through exploring three issues: the price and cost structures, the pricing setting and the capacity expansion with reference to OECD experience. By comparing power prices of China with the West, we find that China has successfully kept its household prices as lower as its industrial prices, while the OECD economies are reverse, a lower power price for the industry but higher for the household users. The finding shows that the plan increases consumers‟ welfare more than the market does. With further investigation to the cost structure of Chinese power plants with reference to the UK experience, we find that the Chinese power producers have lower variable costs than the Western plants, but similar overheads costs. To further explain such finding, we studied a sample of 100 coal-fired power plants from 2003 to 2005 for their pricing behaviour. We find that the firms adopt a high cost strategy to bargain with the state for higher plan prices, because of the one-firm-with-one-plan-price policy. This causes a soft price constraint on costs, which inevitably protects high cost firms, driving up the total costs of the firm, and providing a lower incentive to the firm to improve their cost efficiency. The firms are planned by the state for their outputs. Will the state plan affect the capacity of power supply in favour? The study argues yes, because (1) entry is free and capacity investment is under firm‟s autonomy, (2) the firms are very responsive to capacity utilization and demand in choosing their capacity investment, and (3) the firms seek more profits through seeking more plan outputs that are linked with capacity. Therefore, the firms do not compete in prices but the capacity of power generation. These explain why the reformed plan system works in stimulating capacity growth.

This research report examines the effect of the announcement of corporate unbundling by South African corporations listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. This research was carried out in order to update the literature and to analyse whether results confirm the previous research performed by Blount and Davidson (1996) or coincides with international trends, which displayed positive responses to unbundling announcements. The event study methodology was used for analysing the market’s reactions to corporate unbundling announcements. Abnormal returns were calculated using the market model approach with an event window of ten days and an estimation window of 120 days. A sample of 27 corporations were analysed in this research report during the period January 2002 to June 2011. The results indicated strong negative abnormal returns as a result of the corporate unbundling announcements. This finding confirms Blount and Davidson’s (1996) earlier research.

Online instruction is now the prevalent tool for distance learning. Understanding the adaptable role of the instructor in online distance education is pivotal in the work of comprehending its affordances and limitations. Although there are some commonalities between all forms of online teaching, experiences instructors have may vary depending upon the structure of the online course. The ready-to-teach, fixed-content format merited further study because of the degree to which it unbundles or disaggregates traditional instructor responsibilities by removing the work of determining what to teach and how to teach it. This qualitative multiple case study examined the instructional experiences of adjunct online instructors who adapted to a limited teaching role that excluded selecting online course content or developing course design. Study findings revealed that instructor perceptions of ready-to-teach courses varied according to the nature of the subject being taught and personal preferences. Findings also demonstrated that instructors applied previous teaching experiences to the situation when possible but learned new skills that reflected the modified instructional environment as well. Despite varying degrees of contentment or discontentment with the limitations regarding course content, most instructors found the motivation to continue in their employment with their sponsoring institution. This study provided perspectives on the phenomenon of instructional unbundling in higher education, in which roles that traditionally belonged to a single educator are distributed among many individuals for the purpose of greater efficiency or use of expertise.

Das Thema der Arbeit ist eine detaillierte Beschreibung der Theorie von 3 Grundformen der Organisation des Schienennetzes und -verkehrs. Anschließend sind praktische Beispiele aus verschiedenen Ländern der Welt beschrieben. Schließlich sind Praxis und Theorie verglichen und die bestmögliche Lösung erwogen.:1 Einleitung 2 Grundformen der Organisation des Schienennetzes und -verkehrs 2.1 Vertikale Integration 2.2 Vertikale Trennung 2.3 Unbundling (Deutsche: Holding-Modell) 3 Praxisbeispiele der Organisation 3.1 Vereinigtes Königreich 3.2 Japan 3.3 Tschechische Republik 3.4 Vereinigte Staaten 3.5 Schweden 3.6 Schweiz 4 Gegenüberstellung von Theorie und Praxis 5 Zusammenfassung und Ausblick

The goal of this diploma thesis is to analyze process of migration data within the scope of SAP systems. Based on this analysis suitably desing and implement migration framework that will be used for migration of data between SAP systems. Entire migration framework and migration proces is built on technological platform SAP NetWeaver and is implemented in programming language ABAP. Functionality of the framework is presented by the case study that is represented by proper data set.

Implementation of the Third energy package into the legal order of the Czech Republic Summary This thesis discusses the implementation issue of the Third energy package, also known as the Third liberalization package, into the Czech national law. It consists of three regulations and two directives of the European Union, which determines the energy politics both on the European level and on the level of the member states. The first part of this thesis describes the ancestors of the Third energy package and their accomplishments or failures together with reasons for creating the next generations of liberalizing legislation. The author describes the liberalization in the form of the legal, functional and accounting unbundling separately for electricity and gas industry at the European level, and then the implementation at the level of the Czech legislation. In the next chapter it is further explained, what were the European legislator's incentives for creating the Third energy package, and what new institutes it stipulates. It is herein described that the European Union came with three different unbundling versions of the transmission system operators (TSO) - Ownership unbundling (OU), Independent system operator (ISO) and the Independent transmission operator (ITO). Requirements of all of the three variations...

The thesis deals with the process of creating the internal electricity market in the European Union. The first part focuses on the development of EU energy policy and on the influence of legislative and institutional framework on the creation of the internal electricity market. The second part describes the specifics of electricity and the process of liberalization. It also deals with the interconnection of energy networks. The third part of the thesis is devoted to electricity markets and their regulation. The fourth section examines the development of electricity prices in European countries. Analysis of price convergence shows the current state of creating the single internal market in electricity.

This Master Thesis conducts a survey of the process of the liberalization of the electricity market, exclusively in the context of the European Union. The method of the review of the contemporary literatury is used to analyze reforms in the electricity supply industry. The thesis provides readers with the basic characteristics of the liberalization of this strategic net industry. The main focus is on one particular reform-unbundling- as it influences all principles of the eletricity energy markets. Scholars argue there are direct advantages and at the same time direct disadvanatges resulting from these reforms and it is almost impossible to find a clear agreement on if positive or negative effects prevails. In the thesis there is an attempt to evaluate whether contemporary research literature is able to decide if the liberalization reforms will bring about pure benefits for participants of the electricity markets.

La tesi è strutturata in 3 capitoli e analizza gli investimenti e la regolamentazione nel broadband market". Il primo capitolo analizza la letteratura teorica ed empirica sul rapporto tra gli investimenti e la regolamentazione nel settore delle telecomunicazioni. Il secondo capitolo fornisce un'analisi teorica sullo "stepping-stone theory". La terza parte fornisce un'analisi sull'impatto dei diversi regimi normativi per la costruzione della Next Generation Networks. / This dissertation is composed of three papers and discusses the issue of investment and regulation in broadband market. The first paper reviews the specialized but growing branch of the literature. It surveys the relevant theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between regulation, at both retail and wholesale level, and investment in telecoms infrastructures. Theoretical analyses state that with respect to retail (incentive) regulation, the firm‘s incentive to invest is related to the level of price cap. As for access regulation, mandatory unbundling can possibly discourage firms‘ incentive to invest, but this is not the case for all circumstances because some studies have displayed an opposite (positive) effect on investment. The influence of regulators‘ limited ability to make credible commitment ex ante is not negligible either. Evidence in empirical findings exhibits a certain disunity. The majority concludes that local loop unbundling based on forward-looking cost methodology discourages both ILECs and CLECs from investing in networks, so that the stepping-stone theory is possibly not supported by the data; other findings support the non-negative effect of access regulation on investment. The second paper provides theoretical analysis on the stepping-stone theory. We dynamically model the competition between a vertically-integrated incumbent firm and a facilities-free new entrant in broadband market, where both firms are entitled with investment options: not only can the incumbent decide how much to spend in upgrading its existing network, but also the entrant can choose whether and when to invest on the construction of its own network. The analysis is conducted under three different kinds of competition: pure services-based, pure facilities-based and mixed competition. We find that the entrant's ability to provide value-added services affects the incumbent's investment choice. Our simulation results support the stepping-stone theory that access regulation provides an impetus for the entrant to invest in their own facilities after entering the market based on leased lines. It is also socially desirable because both the overall welfare and the consumer surplus are maximized in a regulated market under mixed competition. The third paper studies impacts of different regulatory regimes on the construction of Next Generation Networks (NGNs). We model the competition between a vertically-integrated incumbent firm and a facilities-free entrant firm in broadband market, where the incumbent has an investment option to upgrade its current network to the NGN. In order to analyze how policy settings affect the incumbent firm‘s investment choice, three kinds of regulatory regimes are discussed: no regulation, partial regulation (only the traditional network is regulated and the NGN is unregulated) and full regulation (both the traditional network and the NGN are regulated). We find that not only the entrant‘s ability to provide value-added services, but also the substitution factor that indexes the decrease in consumers‘ willingness to pay for the traditional service once the investment occurs, affect the incumbent‘s investment choice. Moreover, the comparison of results under different regimes shows that the incumbent invests the most under partial regulation, which sheds some light on impelling the deployment of Next Generation Networks.