The purpose of our essay is to investigate and compare the general and operational risk management in the private and public sector. As an introduction to the subject we describe the differences and similarities between the two sectors. Our survey is based on the term risk, the definitions of risk management, its development and finally the process of risk management. Since our survey is focusing on operational risks we also describe the operational process and the specific operational risks.

The method we used to investigate the subject is a quantitative method. A survey was sent to 100 companies in Sweden, of which 50 were private companies and 50 were public companies. We analysed the data in SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). By doing this we found that the private companies indeed are more developed than the public companies. But the public companies are not that far behind and our five hypotheses, in which we had drawn the conclusion that the public sector was poorly developed, were not always verified.

The report is written in Swedish, which is our mother tongue.