CORPORATE SELF‐POLICING AND THE ENVIRONMENT*

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Self‐Policing Policy (more commonly referred to as the Audit Policy) waives or reduces penalties when regulated entities voluntarily discover, disclose, and correct environmental violations. This study draws upon a rational choice model of corporate crime to determine if traditional regulatory efforts such as inspections and enforcement actions are associated with the odds of disclosing an environmental violation under the Audit Policy. A case control design is used to compare companies that self‐police to companies that do not self‐police. The event group consists of all 551 companies that disclosed at least one environmental violation under the Audit Policy between October 1, 1998 and September 30, 2000. The control group consists of a simple random sample of 551 companies that did not use the Audit Policy but were discovered to have violated at least one environmental law during the same time period as the event group. There is no evidence that inspections and enforcement increase Audit Policy use. However, the results do suggest, first, that the Audit Policy is more likely to be used by large companies than by small companies and, second, that it is likely to be used for reporting violations as opposed to more serious emissions or permit violations. In terms of public policy these findings suggest that regulatory agencies such as the EPA can do relatively little to increase the self‐policing of environmental violations.     

Sleaze, Old Corruption and Parliamentary Reform: An Historical Perspective on the Current Crisis

There is nothing new about the existence of a political class, nor about the electorate's distaste for paid politicians. In the middle ages, voters made clear their preference for representatives who were prepared to serve without payment; in the eighteenth century, the increase in the number of MPs paid by the state, whether in salaried posts or as sinecurists, was seen as a corrupt and pernicious extension to the influence of the crown; in the nineteenth and early twentieth century the payment of MPs by the taxpayer was widely regarded as an improper and offensive idea. The current furore over MPs' pay and expenses is another example of the intense suspicion with which MPs who have received money from the state have been regarded from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.     

US and China Must Share Power and China Must Make Japan Feel Safe

Despite grand visions of a cosmopolitan planet living in peace, the first globalization at the turn of the 20th century descended into World War I as the old empires scrambled to preserve themselves as others sought self‐determination. Powers on the losing end of that war reasserted themselves in yet another worldwide calamity within decades. After World War II, in the early 1950s, with the victorious American‐led alliance in the driver's seat, institutions such as the United Nations and the Bretton Woods arrangements created a global stability that enabled peace, prosperity and the “rise of the rest.” In 2014, the world order is shifting again with the rise of China reviving in Asia the very kind of nationalist rivalries that led Europe to war twice in the 20th century. Will we be able to build new institutions that accommodate the new powershift without resorting to war, or will the second globalization collapse as well? Top strategists from the US, Japan and China respond to this momentous question.