Ex-Ante Study of Biofuel Policies–Analyzing Policy-Induced Flexibility

A variety of policy types are available to foster the transition to a low-carbon economy. In every sector, including transportation, heat and power production, policymakers face the choice of what type of policy to adopt. For this choice, it is crucial to understand how different mechanisms incentivize investments in terms of improving their profitability, shaping the flexibility available for investors, and how they are affected by the surrounding uncertainty. This paper focuses on transportation-biofuel policies, particularly on the financial incentives put on the bio-component of fuel and the combination of using penalties and tax-relief. Delivery of vital policymaking insights by using two modern simple-to-use profitability analysis methods, the pay-off method and the simulation decomposition method, is illustrated. Both methods enable the incorporation of uncertainty into the profitability analyses, and thus generate insight about the flexibilities involved, and the factors affecting the results. The results show that the combination of penalties and tax-relief is a way to steer fuel-production towards sustainability. The two methods used for analysis complement each other and provide important insights for analysis and decision-making beyond what the commonly used profitability analysis methods typically provide.

Tracing the Expression of Resident Quality of Life Policies in Canadian Long-Term Care Settings

Policies favouring safety, security, and order are expressed in preference to those oriented towards person-centred resident quality of life in Canadian long-term care settings. Factors impacting the expression of these latent (under-utilised) rules were uncovered through an analysis of long-term care related policies in four provinces. 84 policies relating to resident quality of life in long-term care were analysed in three sequences, incorporating jurisdictions, policy types, and quality of life domains, over time. The analysis revealed three policy levers: situations–providing explicit and implicit examples of resident oriented quality of life policy suppression in each jurisdiction; structures–identifying which types of policy and quality of life expressions are more vulnerable to dominance by others; and trajectories–confirming the cultural shift towards more person-centredness in Canadian long-term care related policies over time. Although these policies exist, their potentiality remains dormant in the dominant policy discourse, thereby signaling a positive post-pandemic possibility.

Green Industrial Policy After Paris: Renewable Energy Policy Measures and Climate Goals

Renewable energy (RE) will play a significant role in national climate mitigation strategies, including those put forth in the context of the Paris Agreement. This article examines the role of industrial policy in supporting renewables and how it compares to the use of other types of RE policies in both location and quantity around the world. On the basis of an original database of RE policy support measures developed for this analysis, the article illustrates which measures are most commonly being used around the world and what types of countries are using them. It highlights the use of a wide range of policy types, including many industrial policies, and a disparity in the use of industrial policies between smaller emitters and larger emitters, with important implications for which countries stand to benefit from the development of domestic RE industries and for our ability to achieve long-term climate goals.

Conceptualizing the Policy Tools of Spatial Planning

While many policy tools can be used to develop spatial plans and implement their goals, there have been very few academic attempts to classify and illustrate the whole range of tools available. This article reviews the different ways in which planning tools have been conceptualized to date and highlights a wide variation in their interpretation. Building directly on literature from policy studies, a new classification is put forward which has many potential applications in studying spatial planning governance. As well as distinguishing between four main policy types (nodality, authority, treasure, and organization), the classification differentiates between procedural and substantive tools.

Global Analysis of Durable Policies for Free-Flowing River Protections

Freshwater ecosystems are poorly represented in global networks of protected areas. This situation underscores an urgent need for the creation, application, and expansion of durable (long-term and enforceable) protection mechanisms for free-flowing rivers that go beyond conventional protected area planning. To address this need, we must first understand where and what types of protections exist that explicitly maintain the free-flowing integrity of rivers, as well as the efficacy of such policy types. Through policy analysis and an in-depth literature review, our study identifies three main policy mechanisms used for such protections: (1) River Conservation Systems; (2) Executive Decrees and Laws; and (3) Rights of Rivers. We found that globally only eight counties have national river conservation systems while seven countries have used executive decrees and similar policies to halt dam construction, and Rights of Rivers movements are quickly growing in importance, relative to other protection types. Despite the current extent of protection policies being insufficient to tackle the freshwater and biodiversity crises facing the world’s rivers, they do provide useful frameworks to guide the creation and expansion of protections. Ultimately, as countries act on global calls for protections, policy mechanisms must be tailored to their individual social and ecological geographies.

China's OFDI policy announcements and cross-border M&A

PurposeThis paper aims to enhance the understanding of the role of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) policies for cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) by distinguishing between coercive and noncoercive OFDI policies.Design/methodology/approachThe dependent variable is the count of completed M&A transactions, measured monthly. Due to the nature of the study’s data, the author performs a zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression.FindingsSeparating between coercive and noncoercive policies, the author finds that the latter type shows a stronger supportive effect on the count of M&A deals. Considering firm ownership, the study’s results reveal that announcements of coercive policies have a weaker effect on cross-border M&A for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than that for private-owned enterprises (POEs). For local SOEs (LSOEs) and central SOEs (CSOEs), this difference becomes even larger with noncoercive policy announcements. The influence on M&A of both policy types gets partially replaced with increasing internationalization experience.Originality/valueCombining institutional theory with policy change theory, the author argues that international business (IB) research on policy change needs to consider the integration of theoretical policy-level approaches to catch the effects of policy change on firm internationalization appropriately. The findings of the study support this argument by highlighting that the policy effect differs by policy type.

Growth and gaps: a meta-review of policy diffusion studies in the American states

Research on how policies diffuse throughout the American federal system is robust and vast, but there has yet to be a systematic accounting for its results. Using a systematic review and metaanalysis, this study presents the most comprehensive analysis to date of how policy innovation flows state-to-state and the average effects of commonly used variables in the study of policy diffusion (for example, neighbour adoptions, ideological distance between states and legislative professionalism). Additionally, heterogeneity in these effects is examined across regulatory, morality and governance policy types. The study not only estimates these weighted-average effects, but it also illuminates important biases in policy diffusion research. The article concludes by making recommendations for addressing those biases and increasing international collaboration on policy innovation research and results synthesis.

Award policy: types of awards for the municipal authorities

The subject of the research is the establishment and application of official awards at the municipal level of government, including award legislation and the practice of its application. The purpose of the article is to confirm or disprove the hypothesis of an existence of an award policy and system of awards for the municipal level of government in Russia. The methodological basis of the research is the general scientific dialectical method of cognition (such as methods of analysis and synthesis, abstraction and concretization, induction, deduction and analogy), as well as the method of monitoring of legal acts, historical and legal method, system analysis. The main results of the research. A comprehensive analysis of existing regulations and description the general contours of the award policy for the municipal level of government were made. The following classification of awards applicable to municipal authorities can be distinguished. By type of award: honorary titles, medals, distinctions and incentives, as well as grants and prizes. Depending on the subject that establishes the award: state, municipal or public awards; moreover, you should distinguish between awards established by a public legal entity (award of the Russian Federation, of the constituent entity of the Russian Federation, a municipality) or a separate public authority. Depending on the subject receiving the award (the awarding subject): awards that are established both for the municipality as a whole, and for individual officials or other employees of local self-government bodies; a separate category consists of awards provided for the territorial bodies or their representatives. Currently, there is no single document outlining the system of awards of the Russian Federation. Conclusions. Monitoring of normative legal acts of local self-government bodies has shown that it is quite rare to find documents that regulate the award policy of a municipality. There is practically no award policy for local government bodies or their officials, as well as awards for contributions to the development of local self-government.