Business and Public Policy
Responses to Environmental and Social Protection Processes

AUTHOR: Jorge E. Rivera, George Washington University, Washington DC



It is increasingly common for businesses to face public policies and government regulation that demand some form of environmental or social protection. These protective public policies have grown in number, complexity, and stringency over the last few decades, not only in industrialized countries but also in the developing world. In this book, Jorge Rivera presents a new theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between protective public policies and business compliance. This framework explains different levels of business compliance in terms of three different factors: the link between the stages of protective public policies and different levels of business resistance, the effect of country context, and the effect of firm-level characteristics. The second part of the book supports and elaborates on this framework by presenting empirical studies that examine two voluntary environmental programs: the US ski industry's Sustainable Slopes Program and the Certification for Sustainable Tourism in Costa Rica.

• Enables readers to understand corporate political activity not only in the USA and Europe but also in emerging market countries
• Provides a new theoretical framework showing how country context and firm-level characteristics affect business responses to public policy
• Includes empirical work combining rigorous econometric analysis and in-depth case studies of voluntary environmental certification programs in both Costa Rica and the USA