We construct generally applicable small-loss rate expansions for the density operator of an open system. Successive terms of those expansions yield characteristic loss rates for dissipation processes. Three applications are presented in order to give further insight into the context of those expansions. The first application, of a two-level atom coupling to a bosonic environment, shows the procedure and the advantage of the expansion, whereas the second application that consists of a single mode field in a cavity with linewidth κ due to partial transmission through one mirror illustrates a practical use of those expansions in quantum measurements, and the third one, for an atom coupled to modes of a lossy cavity shows the another use of the perturbative expansion. [11,12]. The problem can be described generally as interest in the effective dynamics of one subsystem of several interacting subsystems. A formal framework to describe the effective dynamics of such a subsystem is set up in ref. [13], and a short-time perturbative expansion for coherence loss has also been constructed [14]. To some extent(for example, if we are interested in a behavior for finite time), however, time is not as good as the loss rate as a perturbative parameter. Motivated by this and recent experimental developments [15][16][17][18][19][20] as well as the analysis of models related to them [21][22][23][24], we construct generally smallloss rate expansions for dissipation. The results suggest that these are useful in many areas such as high-Q Cavity QED [15-20], quantum computation[11,12,21-26], quantum measurement [27,28], quantum optics [3][4][5][6][7] etc.We consider an open quantum system, the total Hamiltonian describing such a system is expressed aswhere H 0 and H env indicate the free Hamiltonian of the system and of the environment, respectively. H I is the interaction Hamiltonian between the system and the environment. It is well known that the form of the master equation depends on the precise kind of the system-environment interaction. In order to derive * Corresponding address 1