This comprehensive Handbook provides an analysis of the key issues, accomplishments, and challenges of research and practices related to the interactions between business and public policy.

For years, businesses have complained about the costs of regulatory compliance. On the other hand, society is becoming increasingly aware of the environmental, safety, health, financial, and other risks of business activity. Government oversight seems to be one of the answers to safeguard against these risks. But how can we deregulate and regulate without jeopardizing our public goals or acting as a brake on economic growth? Many instruments are available to assess the effects of laws regulating business, including the regulatory impact assessment (RIA), which contains cost/benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, risk analysis, and cost assessments. This book argues that public goals will be achieved more effectively if compliance costs of the enterprises are as low as possible. Highlighting examples from a wide spectrum of industries and countries, the authors propose a new kind of RIA, the business impact assessment (BIA), designed to improve both business and public policy decision making.

American Business and Public Policy is a study of the politics of foreign trade. It challenges fifty years of writ-ing on pressure politics. It includes nine hundred interviews with heads of corporations, including 166 of the 200 largest corporations; another 500 interviews with congressmen, lob-byists, journalists, and opinion leaders; and eight community studies making this book the most intensive survey in print of the politics of business. It is a realistic behavioral examination of a major type of economic decision. The authors introduce their study with a history of the tariff as a political issue in American politics and a history of American tariff legislation in the years from Europe's trade recovery under the Marshall Plan to the challenge of the Common Market. They examine in succession the changing attitudes of the general public and the political actions of the business community, the lobbies, and Congress. American Business and Public Policy is a contribution to social theory in several of its branches. It is a contribution to understanding the business community, to the social psychol-ogy of communication and attitude change, to the study of political behavior in foreign policy. American Business and Public Policy is at once a study of a classic issue in American politics--the tariff; decision-making, particularly the relation of economic to social-psycho-logical theories of behavior; business communication--what businessmen read about world affairs, what effect foreign travel has on them, where they turn for political advice, and how they seek political help; pressure politics, lobbying, and the Congressional process.

What are the political motivations behind firms' decisions to adopt policies that self-regulate their behavior in a manner that is beyond compliance with state, federal and local law? Public Forces and Private Politics in American Big Business advances a new understanding of the firm as a political actor that expands beyond the limited conceptualizations offered by economists and organization theorists. Timothy Werner develops a general theory of private politics that is tested using three case studies: the environment, gay rights and executive compensation. Using the conclusions of these case studies and an analysis of interviews with executives at 'Fortune 500' firms, Werner finds that politics can contribute significantly to our understanding of corporate decision-making on private policies and corporate social responsibility in the United States.

Business is one of the major power centres in modern society. The state seeks to check and channel that power so as to serve broader public policy objectives. However, if the way in which business is governed is ineffective or over burdensome, it may become more difficult to achieve desired goals such as economic growth or higher levels of employment. In a period of international economic crisis, the study of how business and government relate to each other in different countries isof more central importance than ever.These relationships have been studied from a number of different disciplinary perspectives - business studies, economics, economic history, law, and political science - and all of these are represented in this handbook. The first part of the book provides an introduction to the ways in which five different disciplines have approached the study of business and government. The second section, on the firm and the state, looks at how these entities interact in different settings, emphasising suchphenomena as the global firm and varieties of capitalism. The third section examines how business interacts with government in different parts of the world, including the United States, the EU, China, Japan and South America. The fourth section reviews changing patterns of market governance through aunifying theme of the role of regulation. Business-government relations can play out in divergent ways in different policy and the fifth section examines the contrasts between different key arenas such as competition policy, trade policy, training policy and environmental policy.The volume provides an authoritative overview with chapters by leading authorities on the current state of knowledge of business-government relations, but also points to ways in which this work might be developed in the future, e.g., through a political theory of the firm.

The effects of obesity have become practically ubiquitous in the US. This book aims to provide an alternative framework through which to explore the important and controversial obesity debate that has spilled over from the medical community. This book is not about obesity as a medical condition, nor does it offer a wide-ranging discussion on the health effects of obesity or the role of the 'right' diet.