Multilevel public funding for small business innovation: a review of US state SBIR match programs

US State governments invest in early-stage innovative activity as an economic development strategy. Nevertheless, attention directed at the public sector’s role in this capacity has been placed on federal policy actions overlooking the growing role of states. The primary aims of this paper are two-fold: (1) to articulate the motivations for multilevel public support for small business innovative activity, placing emphasis on state level incentives directed towards entrepreneurial activity; and (2) to empirically evaluate the State Match Phase I (SMP-I) program. The SMP-I program is a diffuse state level policy designed to complement the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program by offering noncompetitive matching funds to the state’s successful SBIR Phase I recipients. This offers an opportunity to examine the marginal impact of public R&D given the state intervention. This paper employs a state and year fixed effects model and considers two outcome variables—SBIR Phase II success rates and SBIR Phase I application activity. To account for industrial heterogeneity, the data are stratified by the federal mission agencies. Results from the empirical analysis indicate that the state match increases the Phase II success rates for firms participating in the National Science Foundation SBIR program.     

Fiscal rules in the Canadian provinces: Abject failure or qualified success?

Most Canadian provinces have introduced legislation to require politicians of all ideological stripes to meet annual balanced budget (BB) targets. Critics of this type of legislation argue that it is unnecessary, confining, and subject to manipulation. We examine provincial balanced budget legislation before and after the Great Recession and argue that the response of provinces needs to be evaluated taking into account the multiple objectives of fiscal policy and the behavioural changes that the rules introduce, including creative non‐compliance. Rules should be evaluated on their ability to contribute to good fiscal governance rather than on their stringency.     

Revisiting the Feminist Debates on International Labor Standards in the Aftermath of Rana Plaza

This paper revisits the turn of the millennium feminist debates on international labor standards in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza factory collapse of 2013 that killed over 1100 garment workers in Bangladesh. Feminists were divided over the benefits of establishing internationally enforced labor standards and, more generally, on the usefulness of transnational activism and union organizing for garment workers. The arguments of some feminist opponents during and in the aftermath of the debate emphasized the relative advantages of garment jobs, dismissed the importance of union rights, and criticized the labor transnationalism. These arguments have left unchallenged the current regulatory regime in Bangladesh by allaying concerns about poor working conditions. Drawing upon new empirical evidence, the paper shows that export growth under the market regulatory regime has failed to improve labor conditions in the sector. The paper makes the case for the continuing relevance of feminist arguments that favor a more proactive stance to make job growth compatible with wage gains and improved labor conditions. As they argued, the scope of the response has to be international, including solidaristic activism supporting local worker organizations, and the use of wage increases to move Bangladesh on a development path toward a higher-productivity, higher-wage economy.     

The Closeness Problem and the Doctrine of Double Effect: A Way Forward

A major challenge to the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is the concern that an agent’s intention can be identified in such a fine-grained way as to eliminate an intention to harm from a putative example of an intended harm, and yet, the resulting case appears to be a case of impermissibility. This is the so-called “closeness problem.” Many people believe that one can address the closeness problem by adopting Warren Quinn’s version of the DDE, call it DDE*, which distinguishes between harmful direct agency and harmful indirect agency. In this paper, I first argue that Quinn’s DDE* is just as vulnerable to the closeness problem as the DDE is. Second, some might think that what we should therefore do is give up on intentions altogether and move towards some kind of non-state-of-mind, victim-based deontology. I shall argue against this move and explain why intentions are indispensable to an adequate nonconsequentialist theory. Finally, I shall propose a new way of answering the closeness problem.     

Portraying Those We Condemn with Care: Extending the Ethics of Representation

The study of crime’s images is an increasingly important endeavour. In this paper I seek to understand the impact of an image of a criminal child (the outcomes and consequences that have stemmed from its display) by examining its affect (its capacity to engage its viewers). I demonstrate how the image’s meaning emerged from encounters with both the content and the format of the image, as well as from the context in which these encounters occurred. I will demonstrate that the impacts from this image went beyond what was necessary to punish, and propose that an ethics of representation is extended to include images of the condemned. For some population groups, this extension can mitigate the influence of fantasies about criminal ‘others’ that may come into play when pictures of them are viewed.     

Strengthening cross-border law enforcement cooperation in the EU: the Prüm network of data exchange

The Prüm network was established to provide mechanisms and the infrastructure to achieve a closer cooperation between the EU member states in combating terrorism, organised crime and illegal immigration through the cross border exchange of DNA profiles, fingerprints and vehicle registration data. While Prüm offers clear benefits for cross-border policing, it continues to present challenges of a technical and scientific nature as well as legal, ethical and socioeconomic concerns. This article reviews these challenges as well as the existing safeguards. It argues that, in order to achieve Prüm benefits and maximise its potential, it is important to enhance the necessary dialogue and cooperation between member states so as to confront the above concerns and address challenges posed by Prüm through balanced measures.