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The Science of Government Regulation
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2012 CommentPatrick McLaughlin is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and co-creator of RegData.
Since the recession began in 2008, attempts to grow and improve the economy have been studied and hotly debated.Yet one critical component of the economy—regulation—continues to elude measurement. Questions like, "Do regulations kill jobs?" continue to be difficult to answer, because of the lack of metrics available for these rules.
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Shrinking Manufacturing and Growing Government Is Inevitable
Tweet Share on Facebook October 29, 2012 CommentChad Stone is chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Productivity growth—the growth in how much the economy can produce without workers necessarily working longer or harder—is the key to a rising material standard of living. It also plays a central role in explaining why a shrinking share of Americans work in manufacturing—and why we probably should get used to paying more to support government programs we value, like public education and Medicare.
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Internet Model Proves Telephone Regulation Should Be Rethought
Tweet Share on Facebook October 29, 2012 CommentRobert Hahn is director of economics at the Smith School, University of Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Peter Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and the economics editor of the Legatum Institute's Democracy Lab. They are cofounders of Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on regulatory policy.
Are you a policy wonk or Internet geek? (Or maybe a policy geek or Internet wonk?) We commend your attention to a perceptive report just issued by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an update on the promise and perils of telecommunications regulation. It explains why telephone regulation is losing relevance—and why the current light touch applied to the Internet is working very, very well.
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Small Businesses Need Tax Certainty, Not Higher Taxes
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2012 CommentJohn Kane is a North Carolina leader of the Job Creators Alliance. He is also chairman and CEO of Kane Realty Corporation, a leading East Coast property development company.
These are tough times. Millions of Americans—23 million, to be more precise—are struggling with unemployment or underemployment. This is probably why the economy and unemployment are the "Most Important Problems" ranked No. 1 and No. 2 for Americans. And during this election season, we've heard a lot about these issues. Politicians love to extol the virtues of small business and praise the entrepreneurs who take risks to create jobs.
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China's Economic Cold War on the United States
Tweet Share on Facebook October 26, 2012 CommentRichard A. D'Aveni is Bakala professor of strategy at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Strategic Capitalism, his fifth book, was just published. Professor D'Aveni is listed in the top 25 of the Thinkers 50, a global ranking of the top management thinkers in the world. See www.richarddaveni.com.
Read the recent report by Congress on China's Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp. and you could be excused for a sense of déjà vu. It sounds like it came from the U.S.-Soviet era. One passage: "The opportunity exists for ... espionage by a foreign nation-state already known to be a major perpetrator of cyber espionage."
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Bank of America Fraud Charge Shows Need for Sustainable Banking
Tweet Share on Facebook October 26, 2012 CommentDavid Brodwin is a cofounder and board member of American Sustainable Business Council. Follow him on Twitter at @davidbrodwin.
This week, Bank of America was charged with large scale and wide-spread fraud in its mortgage business. Federal prosecutors say that the bank knowingly dismantled safeguards in loan review process and doctored applications so they could write mortgage loans that could never be repaid. Then the bank fraudulently sold these bad loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so the bank could take profits and continue the process. The long-overdue charges raise important questions about what it means to have a sustainable banking sector.
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Lower Unemployment Needed to Cement Housing Market Gains
Tweet Share on Facebook October 22, 2012 CommentAnthony Sanders is a senior scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
We are in the fourth year of the slowest economic recovery following a financial crisis since 1882, and we have experienced a catastrophic downturn in housing prices since 2008. The rapid rise in unemployment, combined with declining house prices, resulted in a large increase in mortgage delinquencies and defaults. This left the housing market in a state of shock.
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Obama's Healthcare Trust Busting
Tweet Share on Facebook October 19, 2012 CommentDavid Balto is an antitrust attorney in Washington, D.C. Mr. Balto has over 20 years of experience as an antitrust attorney in the private sector, the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, where he was the policy director of the Bureau of Competition and attorney adviser to Chairman Robert Pitofsky.
As I discussed last week, antitrust enforcement is one of the federal government's critical responsibilities. When that enforcement is docile or misdirected, consumers will suffer paying higher prices and having less choice. Few areas of enforcement are as important as action by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division to block anticompetitive mergers, which can lead to substantial competitive harm. Too much consolidation and loss of competition inevitably leads to lower quality products, less innovation, and increasing prices, all of which is bad news for consumers. Moreover, a merger is forever; once it is consummated, it is extremely difficult to break up an anticompetitive merger.
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Lowest Cost Doesn't Always Equal Lowest Price
Tweet Share on Facebook October 19, 2012 CommentJeff Weiss is an adjunct professor of business administration at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and a partner at Vantage Partners, LLC.
Buyers are looking to reduce costs, and suppliers are looking to improve margins. It feels like this is one negotiation that will end with a winner and a loser, and, of course, that is the inevitable result in many situations. However, in this case, negotiations that could have been mutually beneficial often become zero sum because of the assumptions procurement and sales organizations make and the resulting strategies they choose to employ. Given the current state of the economy, this might be precisely the time to shake this up.
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Transparency in Foreign Aid Matters
Tweet Share on Facebook October 19, 2012 CommentRobert Hahn is director of economics at the Smith School, University of Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. Peter Passell is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute and the economics editor of the Legatum Institute's Democracy Lab. They are cofounders of Regulation2point0.org, a web portal on regulatory policy.
Foreign economic aid is out of fashion, and for good reasons. A good chunk of the $5 trillion (!!!) delivered to poor countries since 1960 has been squandered on roads to nowhere and factories that make stuff nobody will buy, not to mention chateaux in France for kleptocrats. Worse yet, donors had a habit of rewarding ethically challenged bureaucrats, cementing the hammerlock of crony capitalists and undermining the bottom-up enterprises that offer hope for sustainable growth. Most economists, it's safe to say, consider it far more important to open markets to the exports of developing countries and to allow migrants to send home remittances than to write big checks.
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