Regulation

1
Regulation and interference with capitalism?

• With the growth in corporate attempts to
  influence government policy through lobbying,
  political donations, and even bribery, the issue
  of business relations with government has
  increasingly become a key facet of business
  ethics page 492
• Lack of global government makes policing
  multinational corporations highly problematic

2
Government

• Gives business a licence to operate
• Government consists of a variety of institutions
  and actors at different levels that share a
  common power to issue laws.
• Laws serve as a codification into explicit rules
  of the social consensus about what a society
  regards as right and wrong

3
Regulation

• Rules governing business behaviour. Includes non
  governmental agency like Financial Services
  Authority.
• Regulation the rules that are issued by
  governmental actors and other delegated
  authorities to constrain, enable or encourage
  particular business behaviours. Regulation
  includes rule definitions, laws, mechanisms
  processes sanctions and incentives p494

4
Attitudes of business

• Government demands excessive taxes but companies
  want improved infrastructure or exclusion of
  foreign competitors in market
• Government as representative of citizens
  interests separate from government as actor with
  interests of their own.
• Governments define conditions for licence to
  operate ,often restrictive (environmental
  regulation)

5

• EU commissioner for competition enables business,
  also through laws and prosecution of illegal
  practice
• Anglo American style of laissez faire against
  hands on approach of European governments .
• But governments can have interests in running the
  economy, by subsidy or being dependent on
  business.

6
Business influence on government

• Legitimacy of business influence and
  accountability of government activities to
  electorate
• LobbyingParty financingOverlap of posts between
  business and government ( who regulates the
  regulator?)Corruption.. Privatisation of
  government functions

7
Privatisation and deregulation

• Privatisation profits the problem of a fair
  price for governments to sell to the private
  sector.
• Citizens as consumers. Post Office as social
  entitlement of citizens. Privatised service might
  not serve remote areas
• Natural monopolies railways cannot easily be put
  to competition due to integration. Hence Public
  Private Partnerships

8
Globalisation and business - government relations

• Weakening nation state
• National and globalised world co exist. French
  person as Sony employee. Japanese person as
  Greenpeace member.
• Link to sustainability and climate change. Who
  will do the regulatingespecially of global
  supply of food and water? Page 536