Ramifications of operating a Business & Industry Development Center as an auxiliary enterprise

GMI, formerly the General Motors Institute, estabilished a Business and Industry Development (BID) Center in 1983 for the purpose of promoting economic development in Michigan's Flint/Genessee County. BID has had its ups and downs, and is now a going operation. Its experience shows that academic resources can be used to promote regional development. BID has provided an alternative for innovative faculty who are not comfortable with the traditional academic research culture. It is part of a system of business and technical resources, an incubation environment, and available venture capital. For the BID system to work efficiently, however, legislation is needed that would exclude academic institutions from tax liability on income from utilization of their resources and staffs in assisting spinoff and startup companies in developing within their contituencies and communities.     

Amend the old or address the new: Broad-based legislation when proposing policies is costly

If each legislator wishes to encourage other legislators to address new problems in future periods, then a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium can exist with the following properties: (1) no legislator finds it worthwhile to make a narrow proposal that appeals to a minimum majority; (2) instead, legislators propose policies that appeal to all members, not for fear of retaliation, but rather to encourage other members to work on new problems in succeeding periods; (3) in succeeding periods no legislator amends the existing broad policy. We find an equilibrium with these properties in finite as well as infinite period games.     

Bread-and-Butter Agreement and High Politics Disagreement Some Reflections on the Contextual Impact on Agricultural Interests in EC Policy-Making*

In public policy literature a classical argument is that the scope and content of decisions shape both the structure of the policy-making process and the configuration of actors involved. Recent studies have strongly emphasized that the patterns of segmentation and specialization found in national policy-making are also found in EC policy-making. Against this background, the present article discusses the conditions and impact of agricultural interests in EC policy-making in light of the economic crisis of recent years and the increasing budgetary problems faced by the EC. The article illustrates, especially with reference to the Danish case, the special importance of the national interest organization-government relationship for the strategies pursued by national agricultural interest organizations in influencing EC/CAP policy-making. Furthermore, the article indicates how policy-making concerning the CAP has become more complicated as a consequence of the general economic crisis and recent sharp fall in farmers' incomes. National governments are the central actors in the Community policy-making process, and their impulse to promote exclusive national interests in the Community policy-making process has increased. In addition, agriculture has been integrated in the overall Community ‘crisis’ policy, and this development has weakened the segmentation in relation to the CAP. However, because of the general problems of the EC, the national agricultural organizations of the various member states have a growing interest in emphasizing joint activities and mutual agreement with regard to fundamental agricultural issues on Community level. This may affect the role of COPA leaving it primarily as a coordinator and mediator among the various national agricultural organizations, because pressures are more likely to succeed at the national level than at the EC level. This is where ‘bread-and-butter’ agreement really counts in the future. The alternative is that COPA will lose its credibility in EC policy-making.