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.

How government operates is going through a revolution that will result in an estimated $3 trillion of new business opportunities for private enterprise. Cities are outsourcing functions as mundane as parking garages; public-private partnerships are forming to replace aging bridges and other infrastructure projects; and government at all levels is looking to private enterprise to streamline operations and invent solutions to stubborn problems. Governments at all levels have to rethink how they deliver services and what services can be more efficiently delivered in collaboration with private enterprise. Nabers, who served for more than a decade as a statewide executive, pulls back the curtain on what makes government officials tick, the practical and political cross-currents that are unique challenges to doing business with government, and how to bridge the cultural divide between public officials and corporate executives who live in different worlds, speak different languages, and have distinctly different ways of doing business.

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.

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.

In 1933, John W. Hill opened the New York office of what would become the most important public relations agency in history: Hill & Knowlton, Inc. By 1959, the combined sales of its clients--which included Procter & Gamble, Texaco, Gillette, and Avco Manufacturing as well as the steel, tobacco, and aviation industries' trade associations--amounted to 10 percent of the gross national product. The Voice of Business chronicles Hill & Knowlton's influence on American public discourse in the years following World War II. Guided by its founder's conservative ideals, Hill & Knowlton developed a twofold mission: to influence public discussion about issues important to its clients and to educate Americans about big business. Karen Miller shows how the agency tried to manipulate public opinion, political debate, and news media content about such issues as postwar military aircraft procurement, the deregulation of margarine production, President Truman's seizure of steel mills in 1952, and the cigarette health scare of 1953-54. Though its campaigns did not change many opinions, she says, Hill & Knowlton affected the public indirectly by reinforcing the ideas of its clients and other conservatives.

Investigates to what extent business can get what it wants politically as firms and trade associations have a better understanding of the likely effects of policy than politicians and because their decisions partly determine these effects.