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This article identifies a number of ongoing challenges. It focuses on the means of environmental regulation — the techniques regulators use to reduce pollution. It discusses traditional regulation (often called command-and-control regulation), the economic theory undergirding market-based environmental regulation, and increased use of market mechanisms. This treatment of market mechanisms considers them in an institutional context, showing how a multilevel governance system implements market mechanisms. Market-based instruments have become increasingly important as neoliberalism has advanced. While these instruments provide a cost effective way of realising environmental improvements, they depend on government design and enforcement for their efficacy. A concern that is shared across contributions is that such instruments are increasingly deployed in a complex context of multilevel governance and challenges multiply where market mechanisms traverse national boundaries.

This chapter explores compliance in the antitrust context, reviewing both the antitrust and the non-antitrust literatures on compliance and corporate governance to provide a clearer picture of the extant literature and the theoretical and empirical gaps within the antitrust literature to better inform antitrust policy on detecting cartels. This chapter explores the scholarship both within and outside of antitrust to better understand internal detection of wrongdoing and improved compliance in the antitrust cartel context. It explores the organizational environment for antitrust compliance programs, firm and industry indicia that impact antitrust compliance, survey evidence and theoretical models on antitrust compliance, and the use of bounties to encourage compliance.

This chapter outlines the creation and development of the Australian Future Fund (FF), showing how and why policy makers adopted this option to manage the challenges presented by the “good economic fortune” that occurred in Australia from the mid-1990s to 2010. It discusses the politics behind the governing structure of the FF, which is copied from its neighbor, New Zealand. Despite its initial emphasis on independence, political influence was inevitable when selecting and appointing the chairman of the Board of Guardians. The chapter examines the two key issues of “ethical investment” and “ethical operation” and shows the difficult balance of demands between diverse constituents; it identifies the space created by the expectation that the FF will behave in a similar fashion of all profit-maximization investors.

Regulation has been a recurring theme in business history at industry level as well as in case studies of firms and firm dynamics. For banking and finance, the complications of information asymmetry and the systemic importance of banking systems for monetary and economic stability have led to a general consensus that there can be a positive role for regulation and supervision in the banking industry. But there are also important challenges that arise from regulatory competition, moral hazard and regulatory capture. These challenges can be magnified when raised to the regional, international, or global platform. This chapter argues that despite the apparent need for greater coordination of prudential supervision and regulation to ensure a stable global financial system, there has been only limited progress toward practical implementation of these principals at a global level.

Most governments around the world face unrelenting demands for reforms and regulatory improvements — mainly from commentators, regulated organisations, elected representatives, and oversight bodies. As a result, such administrations often seek to deliver ‘better regulation’ through initiatives that are designed to improve the delivery of high quality regulation. Such efforts, however, tend to come up against three central challenges which are discusses in this article. This article looks at responses to these three challenges — which can be referred to as those of: benchmarks, strategies, and measurement. It considers the approaches that have been taken in the literature and in governmental policies and draws attention to a number of ongoing difficulties that are presented by the search for better regulation. The argument presented here is that current approaches involve a number of worrying tensions and contradictions which are of both a philosophical and a practical nature.

This article discusses the influence of environmental law on the environment and the economy. Businesses seek to influence the stringency and design of environmental law by lobbying legislators and officials at environmental agencies. Sometimes business groups play a formal, collaborative role in the development of environmental regulations. The basic types of regulatory design for environment are presented. Environmental law can affect underlying environmental conditions and other policy criteria. The global reach of business in today's economy, combined with the global scope of some of the most salient environmental problems, increasingly creates new challenges for business and environmental law. One set of challenges centers on the complexity of the legal environment within which multinational corporations and other businesses engaged in global transactions must operate. The global nature of some of the most pressing environmental problems has created a related set of challenges linked with achieving international cooperation and coordination.

Although there is a huge literature relevant to the history of relations between the state and business, this article's emphasis on international comparisons (Western Europe, Japan, and the United States) allows a distinct focus to be given to the analysis. The article draws attention to business as an instrument of the geopolitical strategy of governments and of internal social and political unification, as well as to more traditional ideological differences between countries. As a framework for analysis, geopolitical settings and political structures, as a supplement to ideological issues, shed considerable light on international differences in business–state relations. The article looks at two large land masses, the United States and continental Europe, plus two high-income island economies, Japan and Britain.

This chapter introduces a political-institutional perspective and argues that capital markets can function effectively if political institutions support capitalism, especially capitalism of financial markets. It looks at the shape, support, and extent of capital markets, which are usually questioned in the polity. It explains how these questions are settled, which consequentially affects the extent, form, and effectiveness of capital markets. The chapter also studies the main political economy forms shaping capital markets and the modification or replacement of old institutions.

This chapter provides a historical perspective on the relationship between capital markets and sovereign defaults. While the main body of the sovereign debt literature has rarely incorporated supply side factors, such as market distortions or conflicts of interest, we argue that the history of sovereign defaults cannot be understood without including the evolutionary structure of capital markets. The southern European debt crises and the recent controversy surrounding the role of holdouts demonstrate that certain proposals raised in previous default episodes deserve further discussion, in particular, those aiming to deal with problems of collective action, liquidity provision, and information flaws.

Central banks date from the late nineteenth century but the great majority from the twentieth century. They are institutions whose principal purpose is to provide stable monetary and financial conditions, though their functions have varied over time. Claims made for the banks’ powers have often been greater than was merited. This chapter sets out how central banks’ responsibilities arose and how they have been fulfilled. It gives particular attention to something that was almost lost sight of in recent years that of their traditional responsibility for financial stability. Other aspects of central banking are then discussed: the role they might have in supervision/regulation; central bank co-operation has played; and the meaning and desirability of central bank independence.

China’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF), the China Investment Corporation (CIC), was established in 2007 and has grown to become the fourth largest SWF in the world with assets and offices spanning the globe. This chapter looks at the range of unique factors that need to be understood in order to place the CIC in context. When China decided to form its own SWF, it decided to do so by borrowing from the central bank in a complicated swap transaction in order to highlight the CIC’s independence from existing entities like the People’s Bank of China and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. While most SWFs grow from an excess of natural resource wealth, the Chinese SWF is unique in that it grew out of years of current account surpluses accumulated from ensuring a fixed exchange rate. The chapter discusses the macroeconomic interplay between China and the CIC.

Direct investments are the preferred vehicle for large institutional investors to have control over their portfolio investments. This chapter studies the deal structure of direct investments by sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in private equity transactions. Its analyses of direct investments are based on data from Global Corporate Venturing. It finds that SWFs shift from investing in private equity funds to originating and co-investing together with private equity funds in deals. The choice for co-investment affects deal size, risk-bearing, fees and returns. Overall, results of research conducted for this chapter show the strong interest of SWFs in direct investments in developed markets.

The number of options owners of intellectual property confront in how best to exploit the inherent value of an innovation has expanded. New strategies for exploitation have developed in response to the greater fragmentation and overlap of the property rights needed to successfully commercialize new innovations. Although acting independently (go it alone) remains an option and can be enhanced with stealth, collaboration strategies are becoming the norm. The success of a selected collaborative strategy depends largely on a firm achieving or gaining the necessary freedoms to exploit its IP. This chapter reviews the different strategic options and develops a decision framework that can be used to help determine the conditions under which different collaborative strategies are optimal in dealing with fragmented property rights. It concludes by discussing the implications for management practice and research.

This chapter provides an overview of the development of commercial banking—defined as taking deposits payable on demand and originating loans to private and corporate customers—from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Two characteristics are underlined: state regulation, primarily dictated by concerns about banks’ position as deposit takers; and banks’ role in the financing of industry and more generally in economic growth including their assigned responsibility. The changing nature of these two features has shaped the development of commercial banks since the onset of industrialization. In all countries, with the exception of England, commercial banks developed into some kind of universal bank in the course of the nineteenth century. This converging movement ended in the interwar years, when in many countries commercial banks were separated from investment banks. Universal banking became dominant again in the late twentieth century, but in the form of banking conglomerates.

This article surveys comparative institutional research from sociology and political science that seeks to explain patterns of innovation across the advanced industrial economies. It has two broad aims. Firstly, the article reviews three scholarly literatures that link innovation to the orientation of national institutional models: political science research on industrial policy and competitiveness, sociological institutionalism, and the varieties of capitalism tradition. Secondly, it explores in more detail how national institutional differences across the advanced industrial economies impact innovation within the knowledge economy. Drawing on recent research linking sectoral systems of innovation and national institutional models, the article explores how financial, labour market, and corporate governance institutions across different types of economies impact the organization of ‘radically innovative’ companies in new technology often associated with Silicon Valley.

Competition policy is a complex policy field which requires knowledge of competition law and economics as well as familiarity with the framework of policy and the agencies of enforcement. There is a large amount of literature dealing with the law and economics but surprisingly little work which provides an overall assessment of policy. Unfortunately, discussion of competition policy is therefore segregated into rather insular sub-specialisms. This article presents an outline of the main elements of policy but also seeks to cover new ground by presenting a distinctively “political economy” analysis of competition policy. It argues that competition policy is simultaneously a growing area of legal regulation, a core component of economic policy, and a mode of balancing public and private power in contemporary liberal democracy.

Policy researchers have offered two classes of theories of consumer regulation. One emphasizes the role of business in proposing and shaping consumer protection policies. A second set of theories emphasizes the discretion and initiative of regulators. Through a comparative study of the emergence of consumer protection policies in France and Germany during the 1970s, this article shows that neither of these classes of theories explains the patterns of regulation that emerge. On the one hand, business interests were nearly identical across the two countries, yet regulatory outcomes were starkly different. On the other hand, national regulators that advocated consumer protections faced strong societal pressures as they selected the regulatory trajectory their country would follow. In France, in particular, consumer policy was characterized by significant experimentation, failure, and reassessment.

Copyright has emerged as the Intellectual Property currency of the creative industries, to the extent that they are sometimes referred to as ‘the copyright industries’. Extending beyond copyright’s perceived role of protecting creators, this chapter considers how copyright law may not only reflect, but shape the creative industries as well as the content of cultural works. This ‘production of culture’ perspective is discussed against alternative views—the ‘abstract work’ concept associated with idealism, and the ‘romantic author’ hypothesis, explaining in effect authorial entitlements as analogous to ‘real property’. The chapter scans the horizon for reform of these proprietary principles in the contemporary context of the Internet. Where the distinction between production and consumption becomes fluid, copyright law may no longer be able to force a space for transactions based on exclusive rights.

Copyright law grants authors the exclusive right to ‘authorize’ publication of their work. For publication to occur, publisher and author must enter into an agreement where the author either assigns copyright or grants a licence to the publisher to ‘use’ the work for publication purposes. Copyright fundamentally defines the relationship between author and publisher. It is the foundation on which any and all activities undertaken by the publisher must be built. With the development of digital technologies, however, the basic premise that dissemination of a work can be controlled has become increasingly unrealistic. Technology therefore presents a fundamental challenge to the integrity of copyright law. Given the importance of copyright for publishing, the modern copyright landscape has far-reaching implications for publishing. This chapter offers an overview of modern copyright law in the digital environment, and argues that these changes will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of publishing.

This article argues that copyright’s commodification of creativity has established a structure that, allied with aspects of the market for cultural goods and services, enables the domination of cultural output by the creative industries. The article argues that the primary tools of the commodification process have been the alienability of the copyright interest, the long duration of copyright, its horizontal expansion, its strong distribution rights, and the apparent demise of some of the most significant user rights. The consequent dominance of the creative industries over cultural output has had the effect of contracting the public domain and potentially restricting creativity. The article focuses on the question of available legal strategies for preserving, or even reclaiming, a portion of the public domain order to address the negative effects of the commodification process.