Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Regulation remains a contentious topic between small firms, policy makers, and scholars. Business lobbying organizations persistently claim that regulation acts as a deterrent to economic activity. In contrast, policy makers and some scholars have argued that regulation creates net benefits for society and so may have a modest positive impact on SMEs. This paper seeks to offer at least a partial explanation for these very different perspectives. Through studying the majority of UK Impact Assessments issued over the twelve years from 1998 to 2009 and relevant government publications, we find that differences in the objective decision-making criteria (algorithms and heuristics) of the parties involved provide at least a partial explanation of why their views appear irreconcilable. It is argued that both are acting rationally in pursuit of higher goals and are not simply ‘gaming’ in order to gain the greatest private advantage.

Support for small businesses is often delivered separately for urban and rural areas, based on the idea that the barriers to business growth differ geographically. Yet firms in rural and urban areas will also differ in their characteristics, and these may be more important influences on firm growth than location. In this paper we test whether firms in urban, semirurals, and rural areas perceive each of eight obstacles to their success differently, based on a large sample of UK SMEs. After controlling for selection effects, rural and semirural firms are more likely to perceive regulation as a problem while rural firms are more likely to see the economy as an obstacle to success. We also find some evidence that skills shortages may be more acute for rural firms, once selection effects are controlled for. The results provide only limited support for geographically differentiated policy for small businesses.

The 2008 financial crisis has transformed the financial environment for small and medium-sized enterprises, resulting in significant declines in the availability of bank lending and venture capital. This has prompted government intervention to improve the availability of debt and equity capital. Whereas there are comprehensive statistics on bank lending and venture capital investments, equivalent information on business angel investment activity is lacking. This paper draws upon three sources of evidence on business angel investment activity in the UK—business angel networks, Scottish angel groups, and individual angels—to reveal for the first time how the angel market has fared during the early stage of the financial crisis. While the evidence is not entirely consistent, it is clear that angel investment activity has held up since the onset of the financial crisis. This further emphasises the economic significance of business angels and underlines the need for ongoing government support. Policy options are reviewed.

State intervention in empty properties strengthened in England during the 2000s. Reasons included housing need, planning dilemmas, and a policy discourse associating vacant properties with wasted resources. Empty dwelling management orders (EDMOs) were adopted to enable local authority management of empty properties, with associated legislation endeavouring to uphold the rights of different interests and tasking a tribunal with approval. EDMOs nevertheless proved controversial, leading to adopted policy changes. Drawing on case transcripts and a conceptualisation of the abstract spaces of tribunals, recent EDMO applications are examined to investigate applications submitted and the basis for judgments reached. The paper acknowledges that behind notions of disinterested property owners were a diversity of lived situations, and that, in contrast to prevailing statements about heavy handedness, alternative implementation perspectives were evident, including a limited number of applications and approaches that were both considered and supportive. Not without broader relevance, the basis for policy (re)formulation must be carefully examined because of the potential for such disjuncture to exist.

Improving the labor market position of low-educated workers is one of the most important goals of regional labor market policy. Underqualification, meaning holding a job at a higher level than expected based on one's formal education, can be—under certain conditions—a favorable position from both an individual and a policy perspective. In this study we used repeated cross-sections of data about Dutch workers from 1996 to 2006 to relate the chances of underqualification to personal, firm, and labor market characteristics. Briefly, we found that, for low-educated workers, firm and personal characteristics are more important than regional characteristics in explaining underqualification. Higher regional unemployment rates lower the chances of being underqualified. Working in smaller firms or firms with many high-skilled jobs has a strong positive effect on the chances of attaining higher level jobs, while working in firms with many highly educated workers lowers these chances. Women and nonnatives are less often underqualified, whereas older workers are more often underqualified. Gaining more insight into the determinants of underqualification is important for developing more effective policy measures that aim to improve the labor market position of the most vulnerable groups in the labor market.

The paper studies processes of adaptation to a changing climate in the water supply and wastewater sector in five Norwegian municipalities. Our case illustrates that the combination of characteristics of climate adaptation as a policy issue, institutional characteristics related to the vertical organization of the water sector in Norway, and characteristics of the professional network between local and national levels of governance seem to have been conducive to problem awareness and proactive approaches to problem solving. Our findings contradict the general picture drawn in the literature concluding that adaptation efforts are mainly reactive and internally related to the sector. We identify important mechanisms related to the production of policy solutions in governance networks mediating knowledge between different institutional levels. By these observations, the paper should contribute to the debate about the working of governance networks, and in particular to the knowledge about factors that are conducive to effective network governance.

Frequent adjustments of environmental regulations usually cause business and investment risks, resulting in significant challenges for policy effectiveness. This paper examines how regulatory uncertainty affects decision making through an empirical study of the ‘Pay for Permit’ policy in the Tai Lake Basin in China. The results show that firms' willingness to decrease pollution is positively influenced by their perceived attitudes, social pressure, and perceived behavioural control. In addition, perceived regulatory uncertainty has significant impacts on social pressure and attitudes toward pollution control. Firms that perceive less regulatory uncertainty are more inclined to adopt antipollution strategies under the Pay for Permit policy. To reduce regulatory uncertainty, China's policy makers should maintain a consistent level of environmental regulations, set clear and reliable long-term policy targets, and strengthen policy enforcement.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the efficiency cost of transfers. To this end, we develop a model of individual demand decisions about the provision of a regional public good that encompasses a continuum of tax—transfer scenarios to finance regional public expenditure. We assume that individuals have identical quasi-linear preferences defined over private consumption and the regional public good, that endowment income varies between individuals and regions, and that regions have different predetermined sizes. In an economy-wide resource constrained framework we show that, despite its simplicity, this model is capable of discriminating the efficiency properties of the different scenarios considered, and that the substitution of matching transfers for own-regional taxes always raises the provision of the regional public good, despite the resource-constrained nature of the exercise. The model allows very easily the analysis of equalising transfers, which we show to be distorting only when a matching element is present. We also find that, when transfers have a matching element, ‘fiscal illusion’ increases the elasticity of public good provision with respect to transfers, and suggest a potentially refutable hypothesis to identify the existence of this phenomenon.

In this paper I argue that ‘second-tier’ European cities warrant more attention because they could potentially help secure balanced development and territorial cohesion. I compare the asset bases of four such cities (Munich, Tampere, Timisoara, and Leeds) located within different state and urban systems and examine the scope for public policy to improve their growth trajectory. Each city has sufficient economic critical mass and institutional capacity to act as motors for their respective regions and to relieve pressure on capital city regions by attenuating the steady drift of investment and jobs to them and encouraging greater deconcentration of investment. The case studies suggest that general characteristics of effective urban policy making also apply to second-tier cities: continuity, compositional balance, comprehensive packages of measures, stakeholder participation in design, and delivery to reflect their particularities. However, better ways of handling relations between second-tier cities and other city regional authorities and interests are needed.

Following a wave of spatial planning reforms at the beginning of the 21st century, a second wave of reforms has recently swept through several European countries. In this study we investigate the significance of these latest developments by analysing the reforms in Denmark, England, and the Netherlands from the perspective of rescaling, the process of redividing tasks, and responsibilities between the various tiers of government. We show that the reasoning behind the new planning systems and the philosophy they were based on were remarkably similar. Typical catchphrases, such as ‘closer to the citizen’ and ‘development-oriented spatial planning’, were used in each of the countries under study. Although the second wave of changes is legitimised by much of the same wording, the changes are significantly different because comprehensive visions on the integrated spatial development at the national and regional level have been almost completely abandoned. The loss of this ‘something more’ seems to impact the core of spatial planning.

Hydropower development is occurring at a rapid, though controversial, pace in the Mekong. We highlight the role of scientific assessment in shaping the Mekong hydropower debate, taking the strategic environmental assessment of the twelve planned mainstream dams as a case study. While environmental impact assessments are designed as science-based decision-making tools, they have often been criticized in practice as a political means to justify already made development decisions. In this case we demonstrate how the Mekong River Commission, operating in a constrained political environment, has instead used environmental impact assessment as a way of providing political space and opening the discussion on dams to a wider public. The main argument of this paper is that scientific assessment can be politically maneuvered to shape governance alliances at both national and transboundary levels, and to a certain extent democratize decision-making processes.