Honesty in Environmental Compliance Games

This note investigates the consequences of honesty in a compliance game involving polluting firms and an environmental agency. Two enforcement schemes with or without self-reporting of behavior are considered. First, we show that non intervention may become optimal when the proportion of honest polluters is large enough but still inferior to one. Secondly, the increase in the number of honest polluters has striking ambiguous effects on pollution and social welfare. Indeed, we give examples in which an increase in the proportion of honest polluters leads to an increase in the number of non compliant polluters or a decrease in social welfare.     

环境规制对企业有好处吗——对波特假说的一个检验

传统观点认为环境规制对受环境污染的企业有负面影响,但波特(假说)宣称受污染的企业能从环境政策中受益,因为设计良好的环境规制能通过提高生产率或增加产品价值来激励创新,实现个体利益,最终环境规制能使社会和被规制企业都受益。波特假说被政策制定者和通俗刊物所接受,但受到部分经济学家的严厉批评。在本文中,Ambec和Barla列举了这场争论中的主要观点,展示了波特假说的理论基础,进而对迄今为止经济学领域一些适用的经验性证据进行评价。     

Economic Integration,Party Polarisation and Electoral Turnout

Recent research provides evidence that economic integration has a negative effect on electoral turnout. Taking up these recent findings, this article explores the causal chain in more detail. Specifically, it argues that one way by which economic integration affects the calculus of voting is through the positioning of political parties. The expectation is that the polarisation between parties on an economic left–right scale is lower the more integrated an economy is. Consequently, electoral turnout should be lower with less polarisation in the party system. The article employs aggregate-level data from legislative elections in 24 developed democracies. Using data from the Comparative Manifestos Project, evidence is found not only that economic integration has a negative effect on party polarisation as measured on an economic left–right dimension, but also that this in turn exerts a negative effect on electoral turnout.     

Trajectories of Administrative Reform: Institutions,Timing and Choices in France and Spain

The influence of national administrative institutions on contemporary reforms has often been noted but insufficiently tested. This article enriches the comparative perspective of administrative reform policies by focusing on four interrelated dimensions: the choices of reformers, institutional constraints, timing and sequencing and long-term trajectories. This article tries to determine whether most similar administrative systems exhibit analogous contemporary reform trajectories in content, timing and sequence. By comparing the administrative reform policies of two ‘most similar’ Napoleonic countries, France and Spain, this article analyses the commonalities and divergences of decentralisation, territorial state reorganisation, civil service reforms and policies that focus on performance management and organisational design. The article identifies the ‘causal mechanisms’ that characterise the specific role of institutions and considers both the role of context and the importance of policy intersections.     

Decentralisation and poverty: conceptual framework and application to Uganda

In order to shed further light on the discussion about decentralisation‐poverty linkages in developing countries, this article introduces a conceptual framework for the relationship between decentralisation and poverty. The framework takes the form of an optimal scenario and indicates potential ways for an impact of decentralisation on poverty. Three different but interrelated channels are identified. Decentralisation is considered to affect poverty through providing opportunities for previously excluded people to participate in public decision‐making, through increasing efficiency in the provision of local public services due to an informational advantage of local governments over the central government and through granting autonomy to geographically separable conflict groups and entitling local bodies to resolve local‐level conflicts. Based on the experience with decentralisation in Uganda, it is shown that these channels are often not fully realised in practice. Different reasons are singled out for the Ugandan case, among them low levels of information about local government affairs, limited human capital and financial resources, restricted local autonomy, corruption and patronage, high administrative costs related with decentralisation and low downward accountability. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.