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Abstract: This paper introduces a new methodology for measuring and modeling manufacturers’ environmental performance and the managerial and technological practices that affect it. Facility level licensing data are used to develop indicators based on sector-specific criteria but capable of being analyzed across sectors, at various levels of aggregation. This addresses the problem that environmental performance and determinants tend to be highly context-specific, while modeling and policy interests are often more general. Using Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) information generated EU-wide, this approach should be capable of cross-country extension. The methodology is tested on a sample of Irish facilities in three sectors during 1996–2004. Preliminary results show its usefulness in exploring the determinants of environmental performance at the sector and cross sector levels. Word count = 10,049. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

I met Dave Houston while researching an article on the 1983 employee buyout of Weirton Steel. This contact initiated a journey that led me to a PhD in economics and research on financially driven corporate restructuring in an era of troubled capital accumulation. Dave counseled and practiced a clear-eyed look at the conditions for "acceptable" surplus value extraction when analyzing viable avenues for worker resistance. With a quarter-century's hindsight, this paper applies that approach to an assessment of what restructuring has meant for the industrial working class in steel and related sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service and activist learning (SAL) and teaching about globalization can be mutually reinforcing pedagogies. SAL combines community activity with social analysis, attracting many students who want to make the world better. Integrating globalization helps them place local problems in the context of world trade and investment policies and dynamics. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of global processes, students explore ways of responding in their daily lives and become more effective social change advocates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that hostile takeovers must play a key role in corporate governance, by bringing purportedly efficient financial market pressures to bear on poorly performing managers, often underlies proposals for financial sector reform. This paper tests the most influential explanation of takeovers, the free cash flow theory of debt-financed restructuring, against a comprehensive sample of large U.S. hostile takeovers from the years 1978–89. The tests provide little support for the free cash flow hypothesis: that over-retention of corporate resources, relative to investment opportunities, would distinguish targets from other companies. Firms with less debt are more likely to have been taken over. But this and closely related evidence is more consistent with the idea that the takeover and credit markets underwent a period of speculative overheating. Thus the role played by hostile takeovers in the corporate restructuring of the 1980s does not suggest that facilitating such activity should be a goal of present day financial reforms, in Europe or elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces papers published within the issue which were presented at the 6th Annual Forum of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) in Amherst, Massachusetts in May 2011, including one on state-owned enterprises (SOE) in China, another on the implications of the need to prevent major climate change for the developmental strategies of China and India and a paper on the influence of neoliberalism on the reform of emergency services in Great Britain.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including economists over the political economy of mitigating climate change; public investment in low-carbon technology systems; and the global challenges faced by the global warming.