International Cartel Enforcement: Lessons from the 1990s

The enforcement record of the 1990s has demonstrated that international private cartels are neither relics of the past nor do they always fall quickly under the weight of their own incentive problems. Of a sample of forty cartels prosecuted by the United States and European Inion in the 1990s, twenty‐four cartels lasted at least four years. And for the twenty of the cartels in this sample where sales data are available, the annual worldwide sales in the affected products exceeded US$30 billion. Prevailing national competition policies are oriented towards addressing harm done in domestic markets, and in some cases merely prohibit cartels without taking strong enforcement measures. In this paper we propose a sequence of reforms to national policies and to international cooperation that will strengthen the deterrents against international cartels. Furthermore, aggressive prosecution of cartels must be complemented by vigilance in other areas of competition policy. If not, firms will respond to the enhanced deterrents to cartelisation by merging or by taking other measures that lessen competitive pressures.     

Organizational structure and effective environmental management

Success in ‘greening’ a business organization is likely to depend on an appropriate environmental management structure being developed in accordance with the general structure of the organization and then receiving the appropriate support from senior and middle management. The failure to assure such a relationship may provide an explanation of the development of gaps between policy and practice. This article explores differing choices in the structure of the environmental function in a number of UK regional electricity companies and how these choices impact upon the management of environmental issues, producing different outcomes. The paper argues that the environmental structure that is, either consciously or by default, adopted by a company would seem to have some impact on how environmental issues are perceived and dealt with by that company. Therefore, such a decision has the capacity to shape environmental strategy in its implementation and possibly even its conception. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

The climate and culture of environmental compliance within SMEs

This paper reports some of the findings of an ESRC Global Environmental Change Programme project which considered the attitudes of individuals (management and non‐management) in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) to the environment and environmental compliance. The focus on individuals and an understanding of the relationship between attitudes and behaviour within businesses is essential to implementation of effective sustainable development and self‐regulation policies. The research revealed that the environment is important to individuals and that environmental compliance is regarded as ‘the right thing to do’. However, the influence of the regulatory domain on businesses is revealed as considerably more complex than suggested by some other surveys. In particular the positive culture amongst individuals in businesses to the importance of compliance appears to differ from the operational climate of many SMEs; i.e. their capacity and feasibility to act. The research suggests that SMEs in general are ‘vulnerably compliant’ due to a mismatch between climate and culture. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

An appreciation of Professor Stephan Klasen and his contribution to development economics

Stephan Klasen, one of the world's leading development economists, passed away on October 27, 2020. We reflect on his life's work as an exemplary scholar, his relentless quest to improve development policy, and his legacy as a mentor and source of inspiration to his students.     

Intertemporal capital substitution and Hayekian booms

Hayek’s business cycle theory portrays monetary expansion and monetary contraction with counterintuitive asymmetry. On the one hand, it suggests that they both change relative prices and cause costly reallocations of production factors. At the same time, the theory predicts that while a monetary contraction causes the economic crisis, the monetary expansion comes with the boom. I argue that what I call intertemporal capital substitution in industries close to final consumption explains why there is a boom in spite of the costly reallocations. More specifically, monetary expansion only gradually increases the demand for nonspecific factors of production by industries that are temporally remote from final consumption. Responding to the expected higher cost of nonspecific factors, consumer-goods industries temporarily increase output and depreciate specific durable production factors faster than they planned.     

Medication,equipment, and supply costs for common interventions providing extended post-surgical analgesia following total knee arthroplasty in US hospitals

Aims: To estimate the cost to hospitals of materials (i.e. medications, equipment, and supplies) required to administer common interventions for post-surgical analgesia after total knee arthroplasty (TKA), including single-injection peripheral nerve block (sPNB), continuous peripheral nerve block (cPNB), periarticular infiltration of multi-drug cocktails, continuous epidural analgesia, intravenous patient-controlled analgesia (IV PCA), and local infiltration of bupivacaine liposome injectable suspension (BLIS).

Materials and methods: This analysis was conducted using a mixed methods approach combining published literature, publicly available data sources, and administrative data, to first identify the materials required to administer these interventions, and then estimate the cost to the hospital of those materials. Medication costs were estimated primarily using the Wholesale Acquisition Costs (WAC), the cost of reusable equipment was obtained from published sources, and costs for disposable supplies were obtained from the US Government Services Administration (GSA) database. Where uncertainty existed about the technique used when administering these interventions, costs were calculated for multiple scenarios reflecting different assumptions.

Results: The total cost of materials (i.e. medications, equipment, and supplies) required to provide post-surgical analgesia was $41.88 for sPNB with bupivacaine; $756.57 for cFNB with ropivacaine; $16.38 for periarticular infiltration with bupivacaine, morphine, methylprednisolone, and cefuroxime; $453.84 for continuous epidural analgesia with fentanyl and ropivacaine; $178.94 for IV PCA with morphine; and $319.00 for BLIS.

Limitations: This analysis did not consider the cost of healthcare providers required to administer these interventions. In addition, this analysis focused on the cost of materials and, therefore, did not consider aspects of relative efficacy or safety, or how the choice of intervention for post-surgical analgesia might impact outcomes such as length of stay, re-admissions, discharge status, adverse events, or total hospitalization costs.

Conclusions: This study provided an estimate of the costs to hospitals for materials required to administer commonly used interventions for post-surgical analgesia after TKA.     

Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

The human control of fire is a relatively neglected part of the discussion of the contemporary transformation of the planet. Thinking about it in terms of geopolitics is a way to link climate adaptation, extinction and the possibilities of extending traditional analyses of political ecology to the global scale. Such thinking is explicitly rejected as the appropriate premises for foreign policy action by the Trump administration which poses American greatness in terms of traditional understandings of firepower. This clash of geopolitical cultures is now key to global politics, where dramatic landscape transformation, related species extinctions as well as climate change results directly and indirectly from human control of combustion. Firepower is a matter of military technology as well as, in the form of fossil fuel combustion, the essential energy source that fuels the global economy. Focusing on combustion as a key geophysical force in contemporary geopolitics offers useful insights into the Anthropocene discussion and, in particular, the two planetary boundaries of climate change and biodiversity loss, which are key to contemporary efforts at global environmental governance.     

Combination of “combinations of <Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis> values”

We investigate the impact of an uncertain number of false individual null hypotheses on commonly used p value combination methods. Under such uncertainty, these methods perform quite differently and often yield conflicting results. Consequently, we develop a combination of “combinations of p values” (CCP) test aimed at maintaining good power properties across such uncertainty. The CCP test is based on a simple union–intersection principle that exploits the weak correspondence between two underlying p value combination methods. Monte Carlo simulations show that the CCP test controls size and closely tracks the power of the best individual methods. We empirically apply the CCP test to explore the stationarity in real exchange rates and the information rigidity in inflation and output growth forecasts.     

The ABC of complementary products mergers

We present a simple model where mergers benefit consumers, harm outsiders and, depending on the shape of demand, can be profitable for insiders (and where mergers do not involve cost synergies).