Search

The article discusses business participation in government and industry-sponsored voluntary environmental programs. It notes that some businesses are participating in voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) in order to gain reward from stakeholders. The article examines whether business managers associate the brand value of VEPs with the perceived preferences of their critical stakeholders. It cites that after assessing business' participation in 19 government- and industry-sponsored VEPs, it was found out that managers who recognize the importance of stakeholder influences on their business' environmental practices are more likely to participate in a VEP.

Competition to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) creates opportunities for multinational enterprises (MNEs) to diffuse corporate management practices from their countries-of-origin (home countries) to countries hosting their foreign operations. We examine conditions under which MNEs transfer corporate environmental practices from home countries to host countries. Our focus is on ISO 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world. We examine inward FDI stocks and ISO 14001 adoption levels for a panel of 98 countries, and a subset of 74 developing countries, for the period 1996–2002. We find support for the country-of-origin argument in that inward FDI stocks are associated with higher levels of ISO 14001 adoption in host countries only when FDI originates from home countries that themselves have high levels of ISO 14001 adoption. Countries’ ISO adoption levels are associated not with how much FDI host countries receive overall but from whom they receive it. Three implications emerge from this study: (1) FDI can become an instrument to perpetuate divergence in corporate practices across the world; (2) economic integration via FDI can create incentives for firms to ratchet up their environmental practices beyond the legal requirements of their host countries; (3) instead of racing down to match the less stringent corporate practices prevalent in developing countries, developed countries can employ FDI outflows to ratchet up corporate practices abroad given that developing countries are net recipients of developed countries’ FDI outflows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cites a survey of a 1997 International City/County Management Association examining how municipal and county governments choose to produce services across service production mechanisms. Theoretical argument linking transaction costs to government choices about services production mechanisms; Institutional explanations for governments' choices of service production mechanisms.

This study examines how administrative procedures structure the degree of policy influence different governmental and nongovernmental groups exercise in states' air pollution control programs. Drawing on a variety of data, including a unique survey of state air pollution control agencies, our analysis shows that administrative procedures affect the degree of bureaucratic autonomy and level of influence legislatures and interest groups exercise in state air pollution programs. Overall, the results suggest that hardwiring administrative procedures theories may be more accurate than fire alarm theories of legislative oversight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While several positive theories offer competing explanations of how politicians use administrative procedures to influence bureaucratic performance, few have been submitted to empirical scrutiny. This article examines how state politicians use administrative procedures to design air pollution control agencies. Drawing on a variety of data, the analyses show that politicians use different procedures to manage different types of uncertainty, thus mitigating transaction costs between the politicians and agencies. Procedures can reduce politicians' uncertainty about how agencies perform their policy activities, how future political coalitions might influence the agencies' performance, and how to solve complex policy problems. By using data from a survey of state clean air administrators, the article demonstrates both the conditions under which politicians design agencies to be politically responsive and the conditions under which politicians grant agencies more policy autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on how managing state of agents requires understanding of different principal-agent relations. It offers theoretical case for complex contracting risks collective action problems. Product uncertainty is stated to be one of the fundamental source of contracting failure. It is stated that buyers and sellers are unable to clearly and completely define exchange terms when the product cost, quality, as well as quantity cannot be easily defined. One of the risk is that the buyer is the only purchaser of the complex product and when the contract is let, the vendor is the only supplier.