Some Economics of Safe Injecting Rooms

Provision of safe injecting rooms (SIRs), needle exchanges and other harm minimisation schemes reduce mortality and other health risks that illicit drug users experience. However, SIRs diminish incentives to refrain from the use of drugs by reducing the risk of a key harmful consequence of use, namely the user's death. Moreover, such harm minimisation efforts are socially costly. Economic approaches to drug management balance benefits from harm minimisation against policy costs and the costs associated with a failure of community drug abstinence. This article shows that the economic case for SIRs disappears with conservative assumptions about adverse incentive effects of reduced mortality risks even when only modest weight is placed on drug abstinence objectives.     

Constructing and using a company Intranet: 'it's a very cultural thing'

Organisational Intranets provide a testing ground where certain theories of technology and organisations meet with emerging innovative practice. This paper develops a theoretical framework that is used to analyse a case study of the adoption, introduction and use of a company Intranet focusing on the competing representations of the Intranet presented by the staff involved.     

Economic espionage and interallied strategic cooperation

Incidents of economic espionage by foreign governments against US corporations, persons, and institutions are numerous and very costly. Meeting this challenge has become a high national priority, and several significant measures have been taken by Washington that affect the business community directly and indirectly. Allies of the United States are among the principal culprits. This raises a potentially serious issue: How to pursue mutually beneficial, essentially cooperative, interallied strategic relations while economic relations among allies are acquiring a sharper competitive edge? Thus far, economic espionage has not jeopardized traditional security ties. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

In Defence Of Mutuality

“There was something a little unseemly about how the building societies intending to demutualise did so by encouraging their members to vote in favour with the inducement of significant payments in shares”. Should one have no regard for the intentions of those who produced the present capital accumulation, or for the idea of holding reserves in trust for future members? The author is DBM Professor of Corporate Governance at Leeds Business School, Leeds Metropolitan University, Calverley Street, Leeds LS1 3HE.