Environmental Decision Making and DDT Production at Montrose Chemical Corporation of California

In this article, we examine the decisions made by corporateexecutives and government officials that led to the dischargewith minimal treatment of hundreds of metric tons of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane(DDT) waste into the Pacific Ocean over several decades. AfterWorld War II, Montrose Chemical Corporation of California'sLos Angeles plant began making the new wonder pesticide, andMontrose executives worked with local officials to develop awaste disposal system that funneled the plant's process wastesinto the county sewer system and ultimately into the ocean.Faced with increasing scientific concern about pesticides anda changed political climate in the 1960s, Montrose vigorouslydefended DDT and relied increasingly on exports to remain profitable.Years after the plant closed, a federal suit forced Montroseand related companies to pay the costs of environmental cleanup.     

AIDS--mémoire

A czar was born when President Clinton named Kristine M. Gebbie to be his national AIDS policy coordinator. But a year later, under unrelenting fire from AIDS activists, Gebbie resigned. Her departure underscores the trouble that some activists have had shifting from the outsider's game to the insider's.     

THE POLITICAL EMBEDDEDNESS OF PRIVATE ECONOMIC TRANSACTIONS*

Governments are able to manipulate economic transactions in order to achieve foreign policy goals. This article addresses the question: can managers of multinational enterprises (MNEs) structure economic transactions in ways that will limit the costs resulting from government intervention? Using a transaction cost framework, the efficiency of alternative structures (exporting, joint ventures, licensing, or wholly owned subsidiaries) for protecting a firm's interests are assessed. We argue that the traditional focus on the dyadic relationship between supplier and buyer misses sources of transaction costs; by conceptualizing economic transactions as embedded in a political context, additional sources of transaction costs are revealed. We examine three cases of home government intervention in US MNE transactions with the Soviet Union. We find that the full range of structural alternatives is affected by government sanctions, although sanctions are imposed on exporting relationships first and removed last. We find that MNEs are, therefore, beginning to insulate international transactions by making their overseas subsidiaries more independent of US technology and supplies with the hope that the US government will be less likely to impose its will extraterritorially by intervening in foreign subsidiaries’private economic transactions.