business climate

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

While there was considerable unevenness (Japan’s markets remained highly protected, for example), the general thrust was towards standardization of trade arrangements through international agreements that culminated in the World Trade Organization agreements that took effect in 1995 (more than a hundred countries had signed on within the year). This greater openness to capital flow (primarily US, European, and Japanese) put pressures on all states to look to the quality of their business climate as a crucial condition for their competitive success. Since degree of neoliberalization was increasingly taken by the IMF and the World Bank as a measure of a good business climate, the pressure on all states to adopt neoliberal reforms ratcheted upwards.2 Thirdly, the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex that came to dominate economic policy in the Clinton years was able to persuade, cajole, and (thanks to structural adjustment programmes administered by the IMF) coerce many developing countries to take the neoliberal road.3 The US also used the carrot of preferential access to its huge consumer market to persuade many countries to reform their economies along neoliberal lines (in some instances through bilateral trade agreements).

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And in these instances the success rate tends to be poor precisely because neoliberalism cannot function without a strong state and strong market and legal institutions. It has undoubtedly also been the case that the burden on all states to create ‘a good business climate’ to attract and retain geographically mobile capital has played its part, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries (such as France). But what is odd here is the way in which neoliberalization and a good business climate are so often held as equivalent, as in the 2004 World Bank Development Report.41 If neoliberalization produces social unrest and political instability of the order of that in Indonesia or Argentina in recent years, or if it results in depression and restrictions on the growth of internal markets, then it could just as easily be said that neoliberalization repels rather than encourages investment.42 Even when some aspect of neoliberal policy with respect to, say, flexible labour markets or financial liberalization has been solidly implanted it is not clear that this is in itself sufficient to lure mobile capital.

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This entailed confronting trade union power, attacking all forms of social solidarity that hindered competitive flexibility (such as those expressed through municipal governance, and including the power of many professionals and their associations), dismantling or rolling back the commitments of the welfare state, the privatization of public enterprises (including social housing), reducing taxes, encouraging entrepreneurial initiative, and creating a favourable business climate to induce a strong inflow of foreign investment (particularly from Japan). There was, she famously declared, ‘no such thing as society, only individual men and women’—and, she subsequently added, their families. All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

There is a propensity in London not to seek integrated and reciprocal solutions but instead to polarise discourse between economic and environmental considerations, or between social needs and business needs. 182 London today and in the future Imperative 4: Business climate and openness The concerns of 2010–2013 that London’s tax and business climate might threaten its long-term competitiveness have begun to ease. The risk of tax rises, regulatory changes and visa restrictions to London’s ‘DNA’ as an open city have largely been placated by a national government keen to reduce the budget deficit by the end of the decade and enable the private sector to lift the UK out of a long recession. Nevertheless, the uncertainty in recent years suggests that an ongoing programme of joint business climate monitoring between national government, the GLA and London business will be required.

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Africa is witnessing an urban explosion. The continent is set to have over 70 cities with a population of between 1–5 million by 2025 (Patel, 2012), but only five are considered candidates for global city status over the next decade. Accra, Johannesburg, Lagos, Luanda and Nairobi stand out for their comparatively stable business climate and track record of attracting foreign direct investment. Johannesburg is the continent’s largest economy and most mature financial centre, but the city’s security and human capital challenges typically place it behind other emerging world cities in Latin America or Asia (AT Kearney, 2014). While Lagos, Nairobi and even Addis Ababa show promise, there is little risk that African cities’ business propositions will present any kind of competitive challenge to London in the medium term.

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As the World Cities Survey stated, “to matter as a world city you need to score well on all measures; you need a broad base of appeal … [a location] where the ideas and values that define the global agenda and shape the world are settled” (Knight Frank and Citigroup, 2010). Despite the more open global system, the 2008–9 financial crisis clearly widened the gulf between specialised, high-performing cities, and others that lack scale, quality of life advantages and/or exist within a high-risk business climate (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012; Tholons, 2012). Although EuroAmerican cities no longer represent the model to be adopted by others, equally there are only a limited number of new candidates currently capable of staking claims to world city status. The new comparative urban research base points to at least ten factors that established and prospective world cities will need to consider: 1.

World Cities and Nation States
by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen
Published 19 Dec 2016

The highly professional business leadership organisation London First has good channels of communication with central government, often working in tandem with the city government. It urges the national tier to be bold and decisive on major infrastructure projects (for example, Crossrail 2 and airport expansion) and to ensure that the business climate is kept attractive even during more t­ urbulent periods for the economy. London has found that forward‐thinking and planning that leads to bold advocacy documents can help national governments observe the need for reform. For example, in 2015 London’s Mayor, boroughs and the London Enterprise Panel (LEP) developed a long‐term infrastructure plan to 2050 to set out likely needs and costs of investment.

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The budget for Olympic projects is not as large as some cities, but the high level of indebtedness of the central government means it will be a challenge to keep costs (construction and labour) under control and ensure on‐time delivery of sustainable projects that can be showcased as something of a model for urban renewal (Inagaki, 2015). Credible macro reforms to enhance the business climate Many companies continue to prefer Singapore or Hong Kong’s business environment, and some have even relocated from Tokyo in the last decade. There is a growing advocacy for a cut in local and national rates of corporate tax and an upgrade of financial infrastructure and legal regimes to enable Tokyo to compete in pharmaceuticals, hydrogen energy and other green technologies.

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In Canada, the federal government is not licenced to intervene directly in indi­ vidual city affairs, but this chapter shows that it does collaborate more systemati­ cally than in other federal examples by sharing programme costs and jurisdictional responsibilities. Its agencies help fund Toronto’s outstanding universities and many of their research programmes; they have also helped facilitate integration of immigrants and improve Toronto’s business climate (Figure 10.1). More recently, sound national macroeconomic policy has enhanced the reputation of Toronto’s banking sector and financial risk management. Toronto’s high quality of public services (especially health and education) is a significant draw for mobile talent. In this chapter we explore the way in which relationships between the city and federal levels evolve informally and are shaped, to a large extent, by the changing impulses of federal leadership.

Off the Books
by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

Moreover, even in these places, success is dependent on the kinds of non-ethnic-based resources that one finds to be lacking in Maquis Park. Namely, commercial success is a product a stable local customer base and sustained levels of consumer capacity in the surrounding area; safe, hospitable, and attractive business climates that have active police surveillance and decent city services; and a municipal commitment to make sure trash is picked up, cars are towed, and city development and economic funds are allocated to community businesses. Not only do predominantly African American inner-city neighborhoods lack these amenities, but African Americans differ from whites because they have never had the luxury of moving out of their community to develop new business opportunities when the local area runs dry.

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But regardless of whatever cooperation exists between elite MAPAD board members and struggling store owners, the fact remains that it is tough to do business in the ghetto. Maquis Park, like many other inner-city neighborhoods, simply suffers from the lack of a community that consistently spends money. Few store owners claim that demand is sufficient enough to create a steady, reliable business climate. Only the (Korean and Middle Eastern) managers of the two respective liquor stores suggest that they are not overly concerned about the general loss of demand. As one said, "We're busy day and night. Our problem is not enough people, but too many people. Look at all these people in here not buying anything, just hanging around."

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Only 9 percent of the stores on the street have been in existence for longer than ten years. The average tenure appears to be three to five years, at which point the owner declares bankruptcy or sells the store. For all of the small businesses (including those affiliated with MAPAD), the underground economy shapes the business climate. Not surprisingly, underground economic activity most often appears to these businesspeople as a set of activities over which they have limited direct control and that jeopardize public safety. Prostitutes, drug dealers, handymen, and other underground traders who loiter in front of their stores are a nuisance.

Hawai'I Becalmed: Economic Lessons of the 1990s
by Christopher Grandy
Published 30 Sep 2002

If as many people as possible who affected Hawai‘i public opinion could be brought into the process, then the recommendations, however they turned out, would stand a better chance of surviving. 66
Hawai‘i Becalmed With luck, the Economic Revitalization task force (ERTF) could present the legislature with a political mandate for important changes that would prevent the disintegration of proposals through the contention of different interests. The desire for buy-in explained why so much time was devoted to assembling a series of five working groups to discuss issues and make general recommendations. The planners created working groups for five general economic areas: (1) education and workforce development, (2) taxation, (3) business climate, (4) role of government, and (5) economic development. Functionally, the groups were to assemble a list of issues under each topic and forward recommendations to the task force. Politically, the groups were to extend the concept of buy-in further than the task force could. Ideally, the working groups would broaden the support for the ultimate proposals that would go to the legislature.

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The ad, titled “The Lingle Plan,” purported to offer Lingle’s detailed program to fix what was wrong with Hawai‘i, and especially with Hawai‘i’s economy. Table 2 reproduces the content of the ad pertaining to the economy.4 A more detailed explanation of the potential responses available to Cayetano appears in Appendix 2. The Lingle Plan had three elements. First, it called for improving Hawai‘i’s business climate by eliminating unnecessary regulations, establishing zero tolerance for favoritism in government contracting, introducing privatization and performance-based budgeting, and establishing a small-business preference program in government contracts. Second, the plan proposed tax reform that would include cash rebates for increasing payroll, reducing the general excise tax on commercial leases, returning the counties’ share of the transient accommodations tax (TAT), and eliminating the GET on exported professional services.

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The advertisement’s blunder is clear: The Cayetano administration could claim to have addressed or seriously considered nearly every item on the list. As a result, the ad did little more than highlight the breadth of the administration’s response to the economic crisis. By implication, it revealed 80
Table 2 Hawai‘i Becalmed The Lingle Plan and Potential Response* Lingle Proposal Potential Response* 1. Improve the Business Climate Eliminate unnecessary regulations ✓ Addressed Zero tolerance for favoritism ✓ Addressed performance-based budgeting ✓ Addressed Small business preference program ✓ Addressed Selective privatization and 2. Tax Reform Cash rebate for Hawai‘i businesses that increase payroll ✓ Addressed Reduce 4% GET on commercial leases to 1% ✓ Addressed Eliminate GET on exported professional services ✓ Addressed Fight attempts to tax pensions X Rejected Return counties’ share of TAT X Rejected ✓ Addressed Addressed 3.

Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage
by Douglas B. Laney
Published 4 Sep 2017

The same with those who cannot creatively curate and deploy information assets. If we dig deeper into our exploration of likening information environments to living ecosystems, we’re awakened to the concepts of climate changes, disturbances, and sustainability, and how to apply them in an information context. Business climates are changing more rapidly than ever. Call it “global business climate change.” This affects information ecosystems to the extent that these changes must be anticipated by any information vision. No longer can organizations afford merely to sense and respond to worldwide or industry changes brought about by widespread digitalization, business model disruption, and disintermediation, nor by the resulting orders of magnitude increases in the volume, variety, and velocity of information.

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It may be more comfortable to call these “intersections” instead since, as I mentioned previously, in these early days of the Information Age information is not yet an autonomous actor. Both ecosystems also have climates and topographies which determine organisms’ access to resources. Information ecosystem topographies are characterized by data and system architectures, and climate relates to periodic or cyclical changes in the availability of resources dictated by business climate changes. Biodiversity is a feature which translates into the variety of information. Ecosystems with high degrees of biodiversity or “infodiversity” are capable of generating a greater amount of goods and services upon which businesses and consumers depend. But these ecosystems may be more complex and fragile.

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We often see how disturbances bring about or impel structural changes in the way we manage and leverage information. Even climate change affects both ecosystems. In an information ecosystem, however, the climate is a macroeconomic function. Therefore, it would seem that just as with biological ecosystems, man-made (anthropogenic) global effects upon the business climate may alter or stress information ecosystems. Ecosystem Management Many biological ecosystems are managed to ensure the ongoing optimal production of organisms for ultimate consumption (e.g., eating, viewing, playing, commuting, etc.). Correspondingly, information ecosystems are managed to ensure the ongoing optimal production of information consumed by businesses and individuals.

The Streets Were Paved With Gold
by Ken Auletta
Published 14 Jul 1980

Alcaly and David Mermelstein trace the roots of the crisis to “a system of economic growth dictated by capital’s need to seek ever greater profits.” It became less economical to do business in New York. Labor was cheaper in other parts of the country, where unions were less strong, taxes and costs lower, the business climate better. In a competitive system, New York lost its edge. Larger, older cities are uneconomical in still another way: they cost more. Ponder, for a moment, the sheer size of New York City. In 1977, it generated 30,000 tons of garbage and other waste daily—more than the combined total of London, Paris and Tokyo.

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And the public pays, since financially pressed landlords often cut back on building maintenance, giving many middle-income residents another excuse to leave New York. The issue of rent control received little attention in the 1977 mayoral campaign. Each of the candidates was too busy promising to forge a new, pro-business climate. The candidates never made the connection between this stance and their sworn opposition to even a means test for rent control. Certainly, Mayor Ed Koch never understood the contradiction. Like many legislators and judges who pass on rent legislation, this foe of special privilege knew a good thing when he didn’t have to pay for it.

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By 1975, it ranked first, averaging $1,025 per person. In those years, New York’s taxes multiplied thirteen times faster than the national average, expanding by 178 percent. It was no surprise, then, that the Fantus Company, the world’s largest business location consultant, concluded in 1975 that New York had the worst business climate of the fifty states. Sometimes, increased taxation was perceived by New York officials as a less painful, more expedient short-term solution than cutting the budget. “It never was recognized (or, if recognized, never was accepted politically),” observed the final report of the Temporary Commission, “that the City’s taxpayers, its revenue providers, represented a long-term asset of the City that had to be maintained rather than a short-term asset that could be exploited.”

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards
Published 7 Apr 2014

The Berlin Consensus, as conceived in Germany and applied to the Eurozone, consists of seven pillars: Promotion of exports through innovation and technology Low corporate tax rates Low inflation Investment in productive infrastructure Cooperative labor-management relations Globally competitive unit labor costs and labor mobility Positive business climate Each one of the seven pillars implies policies designed to promote specific goals and produce sustained growth. These policies, in turn, presuppose certain monetary arrangements. At the heart of the Berlin Consensus is a recognition that savings and trade, rather than borrowing and consumption, are the best path to growth.

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However, Europe has lagged behind the rest of the developed world in mobility-of-labor terms, partly due to linguistic and cultural differences among the national populations. This problem is widely recognized, and because steps are being taken to improve labor mobility within the EU, prospects for growth are greater than many observers believe. This brings the analysis to the final element of the Berlin Consensus—a positive business climate. What economists call regime uncertainty is a principal differentiator between long, anemic depressions and short, sharp ones. Monetary policy and fiscal policy uncertainty can negatively impact an economy, as was seen in the United States during the Great Depression of 1929 to 1940, and as is being seen again in the depression that began in 2007.

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Both the United States and the EU suffer from regime uncertainty. The Berlin Consensus is designed to remove as much uncertainty as possible by providing for price stability, sound money, fiscal responsibility, and uniformity across Europe on important regulatory matters. In turn, a positive business climate becomes a magnet for capital not just from local entrepreneurs and executives but also from abroad. This points to an emerging driver of EU growth harnessed to the Berlin Consensus—Chinese capital. As the Beijing Consensus collapses and Chinese capital seeks a new home, Chinese investors looks increasingly to Europe.

Smart Cities, Digital Nations
by Caspar Herzberg
Published 13 Apr 2017

Others see a playground filled with tempting and expensive opportunities for consumption and exploration. Detractors hear the noise, resent the crowds, and complain about congestion, unsanitary conditions, and overcrowded residential areas. Urban planners see great potential for both progress and problems. Corporations analyze the opportunities for growth and a favorable business climate. Most everyone senses the future already exists, in some budding form, within cities, but whether one sees a paradise, a dystopia, or something in between depends greatly on economic status, geographical location, and personal experience. These variations in perspective are nothing new. Cities have been inspiring and horrifying us in turn for generations.

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Meanwhile, the push for economic diversification remained of paramount importance to the city planners. “The whole objective is job creation,” al-Dabbagh told the New York Times in 2010. “The biggest oil refinery produces at most 1,500 jobs. We will produce a million.”6 The KSA government’s approach to reform also extended to the business climate of the economic cities. These would be regions where the standards of Westerners and Saudis could mingle without tension. The promise to let business do business tacitly confirmed that multinational corporations should expect no problems sending their best people to work in Saudi Arabia, man or woman, provided the normal amount of respect for cultural traditions was displayed.

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Songdo stood out as an anomalous greenfield in a fully developed nation. India, meanwhile, had the potential to become a breadbasket for international technology companies. Although GDP growth had slowed in recent years, the 2014 elections did seem to be like a bellwether. Notorious for its dysfunctional business climate, India seemed intent on untying its own hands. After years spent trying to lay necessary groundwork, Cisco was ready to aid the push toward a modern India. The potential for growth was rivaled only by China, which by 2014 had become more challenging for many multinationals. JAPAN AND INDIA: AN UNUSUAL PAIR OF ECONOMIC ALLIES In terms of smart and connected cities, perhaps no nation better encapsulates both the urgent need for modern city planning and the tremendous possibilities for improved quality of life.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

The manufacturing businesses that tend to thrive in high-wage economies are ones that invest a lot in intangibles, from the R&D programs of Pfizer or Rolls-Royce to the lean production techniques of the Japanese motor industry. (To the extent that globalization requires the construction of more complex organizations and networks, it could also drive increased intangible investment directly.) A Changing Business Climate Figure 2.7. Intangible intensity in manufacturing and services (real shares of real sector value added, EU and US, non-farm business). Source: authors’ calculations from INTAN-Invest (www.intan-invest.net) and SPINTAN (www.spintan.net) databases. The years since 1980 have seen a steady relaxation of a whole range of regulations on both products and labor markets in most of the world’s biggest economies.

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INDEX accounting, treatment of intangibles in, 202–4 advertising spending, 50 Aghion, Phillipe, 41, 62, 173 AirBnB, 24, 51; contestedness and, 115; legal travails of, 187; scalability of, 67; and synergies, 82 Akzo Nobel, 167 Allen, Robert, 83 Amana, 80, 85, 183 Amazon, 111, 191, 194–95, 197 American Airlines, 49 Andreessen, Marc, 23 Andrews, Dan, 96 Angry Birds, 65 Ansari-X Prize, 85 Anslow, Louis, 127 Appert jar, 64 Apple, 23–24, 51, 87, 104; and spillovers, 72–73, 110; and synergies, 86 applied knowledge, 65 Arrow, Kenneth, 62, 147 Arthur, Brian, 62, 80 assets, definition of, 19–21 Atkinson, Anthony, 118 Atlas, Charles, 18 authority, of managers, 189 automated bank teller machines, 127 Autor, David, 123 Awano, Gaganan, 56 banking, 158–59, 162–66 Barth, Mary, 204 basic knowledge, 65 Baumol, William, 28 Baumol’s Cost Disease, 28 Beatles, the, 59, 61, 240 Bell, Daniel, 4 Beniger, James, 30 Berliner, Joseph S., 195 Bernstein, Shai, 171, 172 Bessen, James, 114–15, 127 Black Cap pub, 150 Blaug, Mark, 54 blocking patents, 113–14 Bloom, Nicholas, 82, 129, 195 Bodypump®, 17–18, 21 Bonnet, Odran, 128 Bono, Pierre-Henri, 128 Boulevard of Broken Dreams, The (Lerner), 178, 220 Braggion, Fabio, 132–33, 134 branding, 49, 76 Brexit, 122, 141–42, 143 British Airports Authority (BAA), 1–2 British Airways, 49 British Coachways, 162 Brooker, Charles, 183 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 30, 82, 123 Buffet, Warren, 19 Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), 39–41, 244n3 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 76 Bush, Vannevar, 232 business climate, changes in, 31–34 Callaghan, James, 127 capital, 10; definition of, 19–21; human, 54, 119; social, 156, 236 Capital (Marx), 126 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 19, 121, 128, 136 capitalism, 158, 243n3 capitalization, versus expensing, 202–4 Chapelle, Guillaume, 128 Chen, Ester, 204 Chesbrough, Henry, 83 Citibank, 40 Clayton, Tony, 42 clusters, 147–48, 235–36 Coase, Ronald, 190–91, 192 Coca Cola Company, 9–10, 49 code of laws, of Ur-Nammu, 75 codified knowledge, 65 Collecchia, Alessandra, 40 collective intelligence, 217 ComCab, 82 competitive advantage, 185–87 computerized information, 43–45 Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, 4, 42 contestedness, 87–88, 115, 132; venture capital and, 177 Cook, Tim, 51 copyright, 76–79, 165, 213 Corbyn, Jeremy, 223 Corrado, Carol, 4, 5, 42, 43, 45 cost of intangible investment, 28 Cowen, Tyler, 93, 228 Coyle, Diane, 4, 36 “creative class,” the, 215 Criscuolo, Chiara, 96 crowdfunding, 166 CT scanners, 59–61, 104, 204 cult of the manager, 184 Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, 79 DARPA, 218, 226–27, 232 data, 63 David, Paul, 151–52 Davies, Richard, 168 de Soto, Hernando, 153 Digital Copyright Exchange, 213 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 76 Dillow, Chris, 110, 136, 188 disbenefits, 79 Disney, 78–79, 209 diversified investors, 205 Dodgson, Mark, 197 Doerr, John, 176 Domesday Book, 2–3 dot-com bubble, 4, 42, 145–46 Downing, Kate, 148 DunnHumby, 23 economic competencies, 43–45 economies of scale, 185 Edgerton, David, 146 Edmans, Alex, 170, 171, 172–73 education and training, 51–52, 170, 228–30 Einstein, Albert, 127 e-mail, 217 EMIDEC computer, 59 EMI Records, 59–61, 104, 204 employment strictness, 32 End of Accounting, The (Lev and Gu), 201, 220 endogenous growth theory, 62 Engelbart, Douglas, 217 Enron, 42 Entrepreneurial State, The (Mazzucato), 232 EpiPen, 85–86, 112, 239 Ericsson, 104 esteem, inequality of, 122–23, 141–42; intangibles’ effects on, 129–40 expensing, versus capitalization, 202–4 Facebook, 34, 67, 170, 175, 217, 222 Fang, Vivian W., 171 fast followership, 110 Federal Reserve.

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See US Food and Drug Administration Ford, Henry, 36 Forman, Chris, 139 Frascati Manual, 38 Freeman, Chris, 39 Freeman, Richard, 124 FreshDirect, 23 Fukao, Kyoji, 42 Future of Work, The (Handy), 182 Gal, Peter, 96 Gann, David, 197 Garicano, Luis, 134, 135, 191 Gaspar, Jess, 146 Gates, Bill, 222–23 Gates Foundation, 222–23 Gavious, Ilanit, 204 GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Coyle), 36 Genentech, 174, 175 General Electric (GE), 51, 60–61, 184, 194, 204 General Theory of Employment (Keynes), 249n1 generational inequality, 121–22 GitHub, 29, 79, 152, 217 Glaeser, Edward, 62, 79, 138–39, 142, 146, 147 globalization, 119; and growing market sizes, 34–35 Gold, Joe, 17 Goldfarb, Avi, 139 Goldin, Claudia, 228 Goldwyn, Sam, 229 Goodridge, Peter, 25, 223 goodwill, 251n9 Google, 67–68, 73, 87, 170, 209, 222; contestedness and, 115; Kaggle and, 152; scalability of, 101–2, 105; spillovers and, 110; venture capital and, 174, 175, 176, 177 Goos, Martin, 123 Gordon, Robert, 93, 228 government: funding of training and education by, 228–30; investment by, 231–34, 234–36; and public procurement, 226–28; R&D spending by, 33–34, 55, 77, 223–24 Graham, John R., 168 Great Depression, 36, 127 “Great Doubling, The” (Freeman), 124 Great Invention: The Story of GDP, The (Masood), 36 Great Recession, 103, 108, 116 Great Stagnation, The (Cowen), 93 Greenspan, Alan, 40, 244n3 Greenstein, Shane, 139 Griliches, Zvi, 38, 62 gross domestic product (GDP), 3, 20, 42; difficulty in calculation of, 37, 244n3; government spending and, 55; human capital and, 54; and intangible investment, 35, 54, 117; IT investment and, 29–30; measurement of, 38, 40–41, 245n10; and tangible versus intangible investment, 25–27, 32 Groysberg, Boris, 194 Gu, Feng, 185, 203 Guerrero kidnapping, 74 Guvenen, Fatih, 129 gyms, commercial, 15–19 Håkanson, Christina, 131, 133 Haldane, Andrew, 168 Hall, Bronwyn, 62, 105–6, 211–12 Haltiwanger, John, 42 Handy, Charles, 182, 183 Hargreaves, Ian, 213 Harvard Business Review, 184 Harvey, Campbell, R., 168 Haskel, Jonathan, 42 Hayek, Friedrich von, 190 Hermalin, Benjamin, 199 Hewlett Packard, 170 high-intensity interval training (HIIT), 17 Hilber, Christian, 216 Home Depot, 194 Horizon 2020 program, 218 Hounsfield, Godrey, 59, 61 housing, 122, 128–29, 136–39; affordable, 148–49; creative class and, 215; planning of, 215–16 Howitt, Peter, 41 HTC, 73, 112 Hubbard, Thomas, 134, 135 Hughes, Alan, 223 Hulten, Charles, 4–5, 43, 45, 48, 56 human capital, 54, 119 IBM, 39, 170 ICI, 167, 169 income, 119–20, 127–28; implications of an intangible economy for, 143; intangibles, firms, and inequality of, 130; intangibles’ effects on, 129–40; scalability and, 133–34 industrial commons, 84–85 Industrial Revolution, 126 industrial structure, 30–31 inequality, 118–19; accumulation of capital as reason for, 124–25; and differences in wages between firms, 129; of earnings, 120–21, 127–40; of esteem, 122–23, 129–40, 141–42; field guide to, 119–23; between the generations, 121–22; in an intangible-rich economy, 130–32, 135–35, 236–38; measures of, 119–20; of place, 122, 128–29, 136–39, 249n3; as result of improvements in technology, 123–24, 126–27; role of housing prices in, 122, 128–29, 136–39; standard explanations for, 123–25; symbolic analysts and, 133–34; and taxes, 139–40; trade and, 124; of wealth, 121, 128–40; worker screening and, 134–35 influence activities, 196 information, definition of, 64 infrastructure, 144, 157; definition of, 144–45; enabling character of, 145; hype and false promises surrounding, 145–47; institutional, 153–56; physical, 147–51; role of norms and standards in, 154–55; soft, 156; telecommunications, 151–52 innervation, 18 innovation districts, 215 innovative property, 43–45 Institution of Cleveland Engineers, 83 Institution of Mechanical Engineers, 83 intangible economy, the, 182–85, 206–7; competition in, 185–87; cult of the manager and, 184, 188; financing of (see under financing); inequality in (see under inequality); investing in, 201–6; managing in, 188–200; public policy and (see under public policy); R&D in (see under R&D [research and development]) intangible myths, 135–36 intangibles, 10–11, 201–6, 239–42; accounting treatment of, 202–4; banking industry and, 162–66; changing business climate and, 31–34, 239–40; contestedness of, 87–88, 115, 132; cosmopolitanism versus conservatism and, 141–42; depreciation of, 56–57; differences between tangibles and, 7–10, 58; effect on GDP growth of, 117; effects of institutional infrastructure on, 153; effects of low levels of investment in, 102–3; effects on income, wealth, and esteem inequality of, 129–40; emergent characteristics of, 86–88; equity markets and, 169–74; as explanation for secular stagnation, 101–16; financial architecture for, 218–21; the four S’s of, 8–10, 58, 61–63, 88; future challenges of measuring, 52–55; globalization and growing market sizes and, 34–35; in gyms, 15–19; and income inequality, 130–32; industrial structure and, 30–31; measurement of, 7–8, 46–49; mobile, 139–40, 248n4; properties of, 8–10; public procurement and, 226–28; as real investment or not, 49–52; reasons for growth of investment in, 27–35; research on, 5–7; and secular stagnation (see under secular stagnation); solving underinvestment in, 221–30; steady growth of investment in, 23–27; types of, 21–22, 43–46; venture capital as well-suited for, 175–77; worker screening and, 134–35.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

While ways can be found for capital to operate successfully under, say, conditions of lawlessness, corruption and indeterminate property rights, this does not in general constitute an optimal environment in which capital can flourish. What to do about ‘failed states’ and how to ensure the creation of ‘a good business climate’ (including the suppression of corruption and lawlessness) have therefore become leading missions of international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, as well as a project of various arms of contemporary US and European imperialist practices in many parts of the world.

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By territorial logic I mean the political, diplomatic, economic and military strategies deployed by the state apparatus in its own interest. The first aim of these strategies is to control and manage the activities of the population within the territory and to accumulate power and wealth within the state borders. That power and wealth can be used either internally for the benefit of the people (or more narrowly to create a good business climate for capital and a local capitalist class) or externally to exert influence or exercise power over other states. Tribute can be extracted, for example, from colonial possessions or from weak states falling within the sphere of influence of some dominant state. Failing that, access to the resources, markets, labour power and productive capacity that exists in other countries can be secured so that surplus capital has some place to go when conditions at home are unfavourable for further accumulation.

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The ‘moral hazard’ that was the immediate trigger for the financial failures is being taken to new heights in the bank bail-outs. The actual practices of neoliberalism (as opposed to its utopian theory) always entailed blatant support for finance capital and capitalist élites (usually on the grounds that financial institutions must be protected at all costs and that it is the duty of state power to create a good business climate for solid profiteering). This has not fundamentally changed. Such practices are justified by appeal to the dubious proposition that a ‘rising tide’ of capitalist endeavour will ‘lift all boats’, or that the benefits of compound growth will magically ‘trickle down’ (which it never does except in the form of a few crumbs from the rich folks’ table).

The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World
by Shaun Rein
Published 27 Mar 2012

While the rest of us listened, the man doing tai chi started to talk about the business environment and the economic problems facing the country due to the financial crisis in America and Europe. The man’s name was Guo Guangchang, the founder of the Fosun Group. The Hurun Report, which tracks the net worth of the Chinese rich, estimates Guo’s wealth at nearly $5 billion. As I listened to Guo and the others discuss the business climate, I looked around the room at their faces. All seemed to have the intensity of Olympic athletes about to compete. Optimism and confidence, born from being raised with nothing but making it big through their own sweat and grit, seemed to ooze from their pores. They knew they could overcome any challenges with enough hard work and patience.

…

In many cases, the drive to make money has resulted in excesses, including many unscrupulous businessmen who lie, cheat, and cut corners as they try to get rich. Many Shanghainese girls told me they would not even consider marrying someone who has not already bought a house (without a mortgage) and car. An electric business climate is pulling and pushing everyone to pursue money. Everyone knows someone, or maybe even has a relative, who was formerly a peasant raising pigs or tilling rice paddies covered in night soil, but who now drives a Mercedes and owns multiple villa-style townhouses. Fifteen years ago you only needed $6 million in total assets to make the top 100 on the Forbes China Rich List; last year the mark was $120 million.

Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 20 Mar 2007

More judicial transparency and global 227 P o i s o n e d We l l s cooperation in this would also fundamentally alter political power in poor countries. African politicians loot their treasuries, knowing that once their plunder is offshore, it is safe—theirs for keeps. If they knew that their successors could get the looted cash back, they would suddenly find new incentives for getting the business climate right. This is one way to break radically from a vicious circle of oil dependence. Supporters of offshore secrecy use several arguments in their defense. First, the system delivers prosperity, so why fix it? Next, the problem is already being tackled, with initiatives from the United Nations, the OECD, the European Union, and others.

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Personally, I could imagine a radical zero percent tax rate on citizens’ share of the oil revenues. To get the money for schools, roads, and police forces, the politicians would have to tax the telephone and internet companies, hairdressers and taxi drivers that spring up to cater for the newly wealthier citizens’ needs. It would become urgent for politicians to get the business climate right—meaning better lives for all. Citizens wanting to get ahead would no longer look upward to their rulers, like chicks in a nest looking to their mother, but sideways to their fellow citizens. They would trade and deal with each other more, helping rebuild the trust that oil has eroded. This matters not only for Africans, but it should concern everyone in the West, too.

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With modern technology—fingerprint and iris recognition and the like—direct distribution should get easier, from a practical point of view. As for the idea that giving people free money makes them lazy: people in poor countries are idle not because they are lazy, but because they lack opportunities. Fix the business climate, and they will work. 233 P o i s o n e d We l l s How could the international community back this, if it has so little influence? A good way might be with a demonstration model, perhaps using foreign aid instead of oil money. The clean slate in Iraq after the American invasion would have been an ideal opportunity.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

In fact this is probably the only major emerging market suffering a large and accelerating outflow of private capital: based on Russian central bank estimates, the outflow hit $80 billion in 2011, up from $42 billion in 2006. This pace suggests that the tycoons are increasingly worried about slow growth and the decay of the business climate at home. Sometimes it’s clear where this money is going—one Russian magnate recently made real estate headlines by paying $78 million for a mansion in Silicon Valley. Sometimes it’s murky. One of the anomalies in the books kept by Russian companies is that high profits are not always reflected in cash flow, suggesting that the cash has been diverted to debatable purchases.

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One of the anomalies in the books kept by Russian companies is that high profits are not always reflected in cash flow, suggesting that the cash has been diverted to debatable purchases. I suspect it is no coincidence that realtors in the South of France say that many of the top-end villas in Cap Ferrat and Monte Carlo—those in the $200 million to $400 million range—have been purchased by Russian oligarchs and big state companies as retreats for the top brass. The Russian business climate is equally maddening for foreigners. World Bank surveys rank Russia 120th out of 183 countries for the ease of doing business. Russia is the only major country in the world that still requires business travelers and tourists to file an official request with the Russian foreign ministry ahead of a trip to the Russian embassy to fill out a visa application.

…

Though his country is still known by a name that evokes the bygone influence of the Soviet Union—“Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka”—Rajapaksa’s regime is working to trim the fat left over from the socialist experiments of the 1970s, including high taxes and government debts that still equal 80 percent of GDP. It aims to raise Sri Lanka from 102nd to 30th in the World Bank rankings of nations by business climate before 2014. It is working to bring the vast swaths of formerly rebel-held territory back into play, and to exploit the country’s long-standing strengths, including a highly literate population and an advantageous location along key shipping routes to India and China. Most economists tend to ignore war because their data sets don’t capture it.

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them
by Mushtak Al-Atabi
Published 26 Aug 2014

This section is largely inspired by the concept of Business Model Canvas outlined in ‘Business Model Generation’ by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. While the book provides an excellent representation of the business model, I thought it is necessary to include competitors and the prevailing business climate as essential parts of the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Therefore, the entrepreneurial ecosystem described here is an extension of the business model canvas anchoring it into the prevailing business climate and introducing the competitive pressures to continuously keep competition in mind while creating and delivering value. Different components of the entrepreneurial ecosystem are discussed below.

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity
by Paul Collier
Published 10 May 2010

An official from the International Monetary Fund had also been invited to address the meeting. As I listened to her well-crafted PowerPoint presentation I realized that her talk could equally have been delivered to virtually any government audience in the world. Budget deficits should be moderate; the business climate should be conducive to investment; and so forth. There was nothing much wrong with it, but it did not take into account the distinctive nature of the decisions facing a resource-rich, low-income country. Yet each of these decisions poses difficulties. For example, it is easy to say “capture the value of nature assets for the government” but doing it involves technically complex incentive problems.

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(For the moment I will park discussion of the ethics of using aid to force compliance with global carbon standards and turn to the other countries that might potentially free-ride.) The low-income countries are not the core of the free-rider problem. Between them they do not emit much carbon, and even if they offered global industry a haven from action against carbon other aspects of their business climate might deter relocation. The key problem group is the emerging market countries, which collectively emit a lot of carbon. They offer credible havens for the evasion of global carbon policy, and do not receive significant amounts of aid. What stick could be used against such countries? Regrettably, the only credible leverage is likely to be trade restrictions.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

California taxes and leaving California: Phillip Reese, “Roughly 5 Million People Left California in the Last Decade. See Where They Went,” Sacramento Bee, August 28, 2015, www.sacbee.com/news/databases/article32679753.html; California and business: Evan Harris, “California’s Business Climate Continues to Receive Poor Scores,” Pacific Research Institute, July 16, 2019, www.pacificresearch.org/californias-business-climate-continues-to-receive-poor-scores; California as forty-eighth of fifty states according to the Tax Foundation: Jared Walczak, “2020 State Business Tax Climate Index,” Tax Foundation, October 22, 2019, https://taxfoundation.org/publications/state-business-tax-climate-index.

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Some census estimates suggest that seven hundred thousand fled California in 2018 alone, at a rate of over two thousand per day. The usual complaints of the departing are exorbitant taxes on the middle class, poor schools and infrastructure, high crime, costly fuel and food, and astronomical housing costs. In many state-by-state rankings of the “business climate” (categorized by regulations and taxes), California now rates in the bottom tiers. It is usually judged dead last in terms of the cost of doing business. Translated, that means that small-business operators relocated to more business-friendly states (for example, seventy thousand Californians on average have left for Texas alone each year of the last decade, and the rate is climbing to over eighty thousand per year), as did retirees on fixed incomes and young people shut out of the high-priced coastal housing market.39 Oddly the state rarely lamented the loss of its once thriving middle classes.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Published 1 Jun 2012

So we actually began to implement team bonuses instead of individual-based bonuses. Today we’re working on disconnecting the link between compensation and performance feedback. Feedback is going to be all team-based. DW: You said you had 300 employees before and now you’re at 280. Is that the fault of a bad business climate or a benefit of being more efficient? CM: It’s both. The business climate has not been healthy. But at the same time, some of the changes we made freed up capacity, and as people quit we didn’t replace them, which built profitability. No layoffs. We just didn’t replace everyone who left. And we moved individuals around. DW: Is the constraint still in the presses?

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What was happening was that we were being forced by the market to reduce our prices across the board, but then any job done the old way was not very profitable. Hah! Not profitable at all! People were expecting PDF pricing for conventional work, and that just doesn’t work. Bottom line: In a harsh business climate, in which the market is the new constraint, and sales are declining, we’ve actually built profitability. Significantly. DW: Does it help that you’re an ESOP company? Does that make it easier for employees to align their interests with the goal? CM: It depends on the individual. Someone who is ten years from retirement is more interested in the value of the stock.

The Global Minotaur
by Yanis Varoufakis and Paul Mason
Published 4 Jul 2015

It also echoes John Maynard Keynes’ famous description of investment decisions as a realm ‘where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects average opinion to be’.6 The alert reader will have noticed that something important is missing from this story of growth and crisis: wages and the interest rate! They do not feature at all. While CEOs, employers, industrialists, etc. would love to pay lower wages and less interest on their loans, neither gets much of a look in when it comes to the large investment decisions, which depend on the overall business climate. If the business climate is positive, and expectations are buoyant, CEOs will give the green light to large investment projects. If not, no drop in the wage rate and no fall in the rate of interest can persuade them to invest. Period. As if this were not enough, once a recession has begun, following a Crisis, falling wage and interest rates may cause corporations to panic, to fire workers and to cancel whatever investment projects are already in train.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid?
by Deborah Hargreaves
Published 29 Nov 2018

It can be argued that there is little a chief executive can do to influence the global attitude to a company, so that when WPP encounters an advertising slowdown and Burberry sees Asian customers turn to something new, the executive team has little room for manoeuvre. But this argument can cut both ways; if executives have little control over the share price on the way down, how can they also control it on the way up? Is it therefore appropriate for them to reap the rewards of a rising share price in a buoyant business climate? How much effect do chief executives have? In interviews for the High Pay Centre about executive performance, many interviewees who were company directors, academics and commentators pointed out that executives were seeing their individual finances and reputation boosted just because they happen to have presided over a successful company that may have achieved equivalent success without their presence at the helm.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis
by Sugrue, Thomas J.

Another nonprofit, Challenge Detroit, leveraged support from major employers and launched a fellowship program to recruit about thirty emerging leaders from around the world to Detroit each year.28 The sense that gentrification, creativity, and youthful talent are the ticket to Detroit’s rebirth is one manifestation of what urbanists call the neoliberalization of the city, namely the faith that market-based solutions are more rational and efficient than democratic processes: the reliance on the private sector to provide what were once public services such as education, sanitation, and housing, and the creation of a “favorable business climate,” by weakening of labor power and workplace regulations as well as reducing taxes to attract capital. In this view, cities are locked in perpetual competition—just like business firms—and need to cut costs and create incentives to promote capital formation and growth.29 This is an old story in Detroit, one that began with public-private partnerships during the era of urban renewal (using federal funds to demolish “blighted” neighborhoods, to construct market-rate housing, and to attract new investment).

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One such firm, Ex-Cell-O, a major machine tool manufacturer, built six new plants in rural Indiana and Ohio in the 1950s, and none in metropolitan Detroit. Ex-Cell-O’s president, H. G. Bixby, argued in 1960 that the reason for the failure of firms like his to expand in metropolitan Detroit was that “there was something seriously wrong with our business climate.” Bixby blamed union activity for the flight of industry from Detroit. The “militant and venomous attitude toward industry has and will continue to limit job opportunity…. Industries, like people, will not go where they are insulted and vilified daily. If Michigan labor union leadership is seriously interested in job opportunity for their members, they must change their attitude from one of conflict to one of cooperation with industry.”41 Forty-nine percent of Michigan industrialists interviewed in 1961 felt that “the labor situation” was worse in 1960 than it had been ten years earlier.42 Wage costs were also an important consideration in plant location, especially for small firms.

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If Michigan labor union leadership is seriously interested in job opportunity for their members, they must change their attitude from one of conflict to one of cooperation with industry.”41 Forty-nine percent of Michigan industrialists interviewed in 1961 felt that “the labor situation” was worse in 1960 than it had been ten years earlier.42 Wage costs were also an important consideration in plant location, especially for small firms. From the 1950s through the 1970s, high wage costs ranked first in small manufacturers’ complaints about the Detroit business climate. One small industrialist lamented that “the unions are so strong that they have more influence than they should have. Make unreasonable demands and get them.” In his words, “Unions have killed a lot of small industries. They raise union rates. This means costs go up and then prices have to go up.

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy
by Robert Peters
Published 18 May 2014

As more and more mobile users are becoming accustomed to streaming content from their devices, this is an excellent value-added proposition for the Prime subscription. Side-by-side with its offering of new books, Amazon allows sellers to market used books and small businesses can apply to sell their items on the site as well. While not as robust or active a small business climate as eBay or Etsy, the potential to earn money with sales on Amazon does still exist and given the size of the marketplace is attractive to individual entrepreneurs. The Amazon API has long been available to outside sources so products listed on the company site can be sold elsewhere on the web, with the poster earning small commissions on each sale.

Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen's Guide to Reinventing Politics
by Manuel Arriaga
Published 1 Jan 2014

If—because of either general political uncertainty or the adoption of particularly strict regulations—some companies decide to stop operating in a given country, the relative scarcity of the products or services those companies used to provide will lead to an increase in their price until other companies that are well-positioned to provide those products or services enter that market because of the increased opportunity for profit. Because managers and entrepreneurs differ both in their judgment of situations and their appetite for risk-taking, what some regard as a less attractive business climate, others will invariably see as offering unexplored business opportunities. This is the very essence of how a market economy operates, and it makes the economy robust to any sort of political change. This is not, of course, to say that an economy will be unaffected by an increase in the perceived cost of (or uncertainty associated with) conducting business there.

How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes
by Peter D. Schiff and Andrew J. Schiff
Published 2 May 2010

A few years later, a boost toward prosperity was provided by the election of Roughy Redfish to Senator-in-Chief. Roughy succeeded in lowering taxes, rolling back some burdensome regulations, and reducing barriers to free trade with other islands. However, he failed in his promise to reduce government spending. Despite the favorable business climate he instilled, the difference between what the Senate spent and what it raised in taxes continued to grow. In fact, under Roughy’s watch, the gap widened dangerously. Fortunately, fresh fish from foreign sources continued to roll into the bank. The notes that were used to pay for these fish were exported and never redeemed for actual fish.

Cyprus - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
by Constantine Buhayer
Published 24 Feb 2022

Clearly there are laws and social order, but, he said, “the law here is not a strict procedure.” Though a political minority pushes for partition, the fact that many Turks benefit hugely from the unregulated status of the North indicates that Ankara would prefer it to be a Turkish Hong Kong. Business Climate and Meetings There are no short meetings—they can last one, two, or five hours. They usually end when the boss wraps it up. The managing director makes sure everyone is fed and contented. Personal relationships trump colleague relationships. Some people can have such good personal skills that it distracts from fact that they don’t have the required competence, and they may go high up the ladder.

The Global Citizen: A Guide to Creating an International Life and Career
by Elizabeth Kruempelmann
Published 14 Jul 2002

I didn’t get rich, but the experience made up for it in full. Read more about Elizabeth Kruempelmann’s international experiences in chapters two, five, and seven. This is an excellent online connection to chamber of commerce offices worldwide that can provide you with information about local business climates. • Learn the Language Among the things you should do sooner rather than later is get signed up for a language class, if necessary. If you wait too long, you’ll get too much in the habit of speaking English. University courses are cheap and allow you to meet locals. You could also arrange a language exchange with a local student who gives you an hour of language lessons in exchange for an hour of English lessons.

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If you want an expat-type package, working overseas might be the only way to get it. Otherwise, you’ll have to mold your expectations to the current job market at home. That’s reality. H O M E S W E E T H O M E : R E PAT R I AT I O N R E A L I T Y 351 A final challenge is when you find yourself job hunting in a changed business climate. This is precisely why keeping your network alive throughout your life is important. You never know when and who you may need to call on. You might have left during an economic boom and returned during a recession, or vice versa. Your company could have been restructured and key colleagues might have left the firm, or your company might have grown and added a lot of new employees with whom you must now build new relationships.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed
by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
Published 1 Jan 1994

I left unspoken the obvious fact that I could not be taking over at a worse time, in the sour aftermath of the Vietnam War, when defense spending was about as low as military morale, and we were down to fifteen hundred workers from a high of six thousand five years earlier. The Ford administration still had two years to run, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was acting like a guy with battery problems on his hearing aid when it came to listening to any pitches for new airplanes. And to add anxiety to a less than promising business climate, Lockheed was then teetering on the edge of corporate and moral bankruptcy in the wake of a bribery scandal, which first surfaced the year before I took over and threatened to bring down nearly half a dozen governments around the world. Lockheed executives admitted paying millions in bribes over more than a decade to the Dutch (Crown Prince Bernhard, husband of Queen Juliana, in particular), to key Japanese and West German politicians, to Italian officials and generals, and to other highly placed figures from Hong Kong to Saudi Arabia, in order to get them to buy our airplanes.

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Going “skunky” is a very practical way to take modest risks, provided that top management is willing to surrender oversight in exchange for a truly independent operation that can make everyone look good if its technology innovations really catch on, as with stealth. By keeping low overhead and modest investment, a Skunk Works failure is an acceptable research and development risk to top management. Frankly, in today’s austere business climate I don’t think a Skunk Works would be feasible if it could not rely on the resources of the parent entity to supply the facilities, tools, and workers for a particular project and then return them to the main plant when the task is completed. But given the right project and motivation, even the usually rigid corporate controls dominating Detroit automakers can benefit enormously from a Skunk Works–style operation for new product research and development, as Ford Motor Company proved recently in producing a new model of its classic Mustang automobile.

Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours
by Marc Nager , Clint Nelsen and Franck Nouyrigat
Published 8 Nov 2011

Users of the site are able to upload pictures of any object they find to a database via a mobile app, while others are able to search for missing objects on the website. Additionally, the whole service is being provided free of charge. We read recently about something called the Legatum Prosperity Index—a global study that looks at the business climates in a variety of countries. We were not surprised to find that a country's ability to foster a climate of entrepreneurship has a significant effect on that country's overall well-being. An atmosphere of trust is at the heart of both. It can be scary trying to be an entrepreneur. But we need to help people come together and move beyond that feeling.

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker
Published 14 Sep 2010

Within a few years, it was evident to all involved that the established legal framework for recognizing unions—the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA—placed few real limits on increasingly vigorous antiunion activities. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 1984, a prominent “union avoidance” consultant observed that the “current government and business climate presents a unique opportunity for companies… to develop and implement long-term plans for conducting business in a union-free environment.” The “critical test,” he continued, was whether corporations had the “intellectual discipline and foresight to capitalize on this rare moment in our history.”29 They did.

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Indeed, from the beginning, just as the DLC’s membership was limited to elected officials, its base of support was similarly select… In that sense, the DLC was an elite organization in every regard.31 The DLC’s economic message stressed the need for adjustment to “the new realities of the postindustrial global economy.” It emphasized that government should work with a soft touch to foster a strong business climate, promoting free trade and investments in technology, infrastructure, and training to enhance the productivity of the workforce.32 Perhaps most significant, the DLC placed heavy stress on deficit reduction as a key element of economic policy. Moreover, DLC leaders framed the deficit issue in a way that is now familiar but was at the time a substantial change, identifying “entitlements” as the biggest problem.

Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 2006

If we undertake a rapid overview, looking not at the U.S. case but at countries with an even higher tax burden of direct and progressive taxes, such as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, we can find, based on international comparisons, that the force applied to the taxpayer does not appear to have a negative impact on the business climate nor on initiative for Why Institutions Matter 261 establishing new firms.60 This means, then, that the better the guarantee of property rights, the greater the likelihood that taxes will not be evaded. This does not mean that the above-mentioned countries are free of serious fiscal problems.

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See Antonio María Hernández, Daniel Zovatto, and Manuel Mora y Araujo, Argentina una sociedad anómica: Encuesta de cultura constitucional (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, 2005), pp. 81ff. 60. For example, see the study by the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006). This situation also has to do with the business climate, for it is affected by the high corporate taxes imposed on companies (typical of poor countries that do not tax individuals as much as in the rich countries), which create incentives for evasion. 61. With respect to this notion, see the second section, “El desafío: De una democracia de electores a una democracia de ciudadanos,” of United Nations Development Program, La democracia en América Latina: Hacia una democracia de ciudadanos y ciudadanas (New York: UNDP, 2004), pp. 33ff. 62.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

And we started finding people passed out on the sidewalk, sometimes with their pants around their knees. But none of these problems started with the pandemic. Between 2008 and 2019, eighteen thousand companies, including Toyota, Charles Schwab, and Hewlett-Packard, fled California due to a constellation of problems sometimes summarized as “poor business climate.”1 California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax, and highest sales tax in the United States, spends significantly more than other states on homelessness, and yet has worse outcomes.2 “I came out here in 1983,” said HBO’s Bill Maher to Representative Adam Schiff in the fall of 2020.

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See contingency management Bellisario, Jeff, 245 Benioff, Marc, 4–5, 6, 31, 32, 35, 263–264 Berg, Steve, 37, 82 Berlinn, Jacqui and son Corey, 20–21, 26, 79, 82, 288–289, 290 Berne, Eric, 142–143 Best, Carmen, 172–176, 189, 198–199, 202–204 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker), 181–182 Biden, Hunter, 246 Biden, Joe, 42, 246–247 Bigg, Dan, 66–67 Black Lives Matter movement, 165, 173–176, 189, 207, 208, 242, 256 Boden, Paul, 64, 124, 135 Boston, 6, 20, 36 Boudin, Chesa, 137–138, 155, 170, 189, 193–195, 229 Bratton, William, 200 Breed, London, 2, 4, 22, 23, 31, 89, 93, 111, 191, 238 Britt, Harry, 228 Brown, Jerry, 148, 192, 221, 222, 248 Brown, Willie homeless population and, 14, 24, 26, 82, 113–114 Jim Jones and, 219, 220, 222, 223–224 Burton, John, 221 Bush, George W., 10 California companies’ leaving due to “poor business climate,” xiv demographic age of voters, 255 drug laws in, 47 new state agency proposed for. See Cal-Psych as political swing state, 247–248 western frontier culture and individualism in, 257–259, 284, 286 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), 251 Cal-Psych (proposed new state agency), 267–275 drug addiction and, 270, 271 homelessness and, 270–271, 274 law enforcement and, 271–272 mental illness and, 268–270, 271 money to fund, 272 possible opposition to, 272–273 Campos, David, 189 Canada, 66, 165 capitalism Foucault and, 183 Marx and, 213–214 “Care Not Cash” ballot measure, 15, 19 caring, differing progressive and conservative interpretations of, 211, 224 Carter, Jimmy, 11, 55, 148 Carter, Rosalynn, 221 Center for Policing Equity, 169 Cheema, Boona, 12, 121, 280–281 Chicago cash payment to homeless, 18, 19 homeless in, 6, 7, 11 overdose deaths and, 43 Chicoine, Louis, 33, 37, 120, 121 Chomsky, Noam, 261 civilization and cities, generally anarchy, disorder, and loss of freedoms in, 282–285 behavioral expectations and, 262 criminal justice and, 262–263 need for citizens to speak out against decline of, 287–290 progressive discourse and degrading of, 229–235, 247 redevelopment’s benefits to dignity and society, 277–280 values and conditions in, 261–discourse and degrading of life in, 229–235, 247265 Clark, Cory, 142, 143 Clinton, Bill, 42, 47, 128 Coalition on Homelessness, in San Francisco, 4, 11, 14–15, 17, 19, 21, 24, 31, 124, 210, 212–213, 240, 242, 281 Collison, Patrick, 4, 263–265 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 213–215 Congressional Black Caucus, 42 conservatives ceding issue of homelessness to progressives, 248–250, 258 interpretations of Moral Foundations Theory, 211–213, 215, 224, 261 mental illness and housing, 267 conservatorship, mental illness and, 109–114, 120–121, 240, 246, 268–270, 272 Content of Our Character, The (Steele), 143 contingency management, mental illness and, 114–116, 258 Cops Across (Nadelmann), 45–46 COVID-19 California prison population reductions and, xiv, 22 deaths from, compared to overdose deaths, 290 disruption caused by, 267 harm reduction and, 163–164 hotel housing without accountability, 240–241, 244 housing scarcity and, 254 reopening of public schools in San Francisco and, 237–238 social safety net funding increase and, 130–131 crime and policing good policing and crime reduction, 199–202 homicides and, 176–177, 179–182, 194–200 hostility toward police, 205–206 law and order policies in 1970s to 1990s, 186–187 police violence and racism, 163–172 property crimes and, 179, 192–194 protests and autonomous zones, 172–176, 189–192, 202–203 public belief in government’s legitimacy and, 181, 183, 197 rise and fall of crime rates, 179–182 shrinking police forces, 204–206 “swift, certain, and fair” probation programs and, 201–202 see also law enforcement; prisons Crook, Jamie, 80, 117 Culhane, Dennis, 23, 38, 135, 244 Cuomo, Chris, 174 D’Amato, Al, 45 Dark Triad, of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, 146–147, 218 Davis, Angela, 222 de Blasio, Bill, 205 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 13 Defoe, Daniel, 102 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 182 Dix, Dorothea, 102–103 Dorsey, Jack, 4 drug addiction abstinence-contingent housing and, 36–37 Amsterdam’s combination of law enforcement and social services, 73–77, 114, 115, 265–266 and burdens put on cities, 50–51 California’s discouraging tobacco use but allowing advertising of drugs, 62–63 decriminalization and, 45–49, 53, 55, 64, 66, 69–71, 73, 150, 189, 235, 242, 249, 266, 282 disaffiliation as result of, 13–14, 59–62, 259 displacement, poverty, and racism seen as roots of, 63–67 falling drug prices and, 46 harm reduction approach to, 35–36, 45–48, 56–58, 63–71, 150, 229, 247–249, 274 homelessness and, 7–9, 12–14, 20–24, 35, 44, 76–77, 240 mandatory treatment issues, 67–69, 77–83, 213 mental illness and, 90–91, 98 overdose deaths and, 42–44, 47–54, 56, 63–71, 83, 125, 246, 266–267, 289–290 proposed Cal-Psych agency and, 270, 271 unused housing services and, 22–24 drug courts, 54, 58, 69, 271 Drug Use for Grown-Ups (Hart), 70 Durkan, Jenny, 192 Earned Income Tax Credit, 127–129 Eide, Stephen, 249, 267, 275, 280 Emile (Rousseau), 151–152 Engels, Friedrich, 213 Euphemia (hospital ship), 103 fairness, differing progressive and conservative interpretations of, 211–212, 224, 261 Feinstein, Dianne, 87, 227–229 Fewer, Sandra Lee, 189 Floyd, George, death of and reactions to, xiii, 165, 172, 173, 175, 191–192, 208 Fonda, Jane, 184 Foote, Laura, 253, 254, 256 Ford, Gerald, 11 Foucault, Michel individual responsibility as myth, 141 Jim Jones and, 226 mental illness treatment and, 105–106, 108, 113 power of language and, 229–230 radical prison movement and, 182, 184–185, 190 sexuality and, 236 Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, 285 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 101, 217 Frankl, Viktor, 139–140, 143–144, 283, 284, 286 free will, human motivation and personal responsibility, 139–144, 155–158 freedom progressive and conservative interpretations of, 283–284 responsibility and, 286 Freud, Sigmund, 139 Friedenbach, Jennifer criticism of Safe Sleeping Sites, 242 homeless as victims and, 123–124, 125, 212, 260 impact on public policy, 260 on Newsom, 240 Proposition C and, 11, 31, 263 on shelters, 24, 27–29 see also Coalition on Homeless Fryer, Roland, 166, 168–169, 172, 197 Garcetti, Eric, 28 Garrow, Eve, 117–118 Ginsberg, Allen, 54–55 Glide Memorial Church, 19, 63, 69, 221, 227 Goffman, Erving, 106 Gong, Neil, 67–68, 113 Gowan, Teresa, 44, 134, 136, 149, 156, 159 Gramsci, Antonio, 214 Grateful Dead, 184 Haidt, Jonathan, 211, 216, 261–262, 284 Haney, Matt, 21, 81, 93, 111, 189, 242 Harm Reduction Coalition, 25, 46, 62, 64, 66, 78, 123, 212 influence on policies, 242–243 Harris, Kamala, 197, 246–247 Hart, Carl L., 70 Harvard Public Heath Review study, 169 Hawaii, 3, 201, 251 Herring, Chris, 21, 29, 31, 52, 61–62, 281 High Point, NC, 200 Hippocrates, 101 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 236 Hobbes, Thomas, 182 homeless population camping equipment given to, 18 cash payments to, 18–19 chronic increase in San Francisco’s, but decline in nation’s, 5–7, 10–11 conservatives ceding issue of homelessness to progressives, 248–250 costs to cities, 209–211, 250, 244, 245, 264 deaths rates and health issues of, 33–36 drawn to California for climate, housing, and drugs, 3–5, 8, 19–22 drug addiction and, 7–9, 12–14, 20–24, 35, 44, 76–77, 240 homelessness as choice, 131–135 homelessness blamed on poverty, trauma, and racism despite social networks and declines in all three, 123–131 “homelessness” discourse, but lack of treatment for, 135–139, 259–260 HUD definition of chronic homelessness, 6 increase in San Francisco’s, but decline nationally, 239 mental illness and, 8, 13, 33, 36, 89–90, 98–99, 109, 231–233, 240 ongoing attempts to provide housing for, 9–15 Persecutor-Victim-Rescuer “game” and, 144–150 progressive discourse about and degrading of civilized life, 229–235, 247 progressives and right to camp in public places, 17–18 progressives see as victims, 24–26 proposed Cal-Psych agency and, 270–271 shelters for, cost of alternatives to, 30–32 shelter for, need for responsible behavior at, 280–281 shelters for, opposition to, 27–32 supportive housing options for, 10–11, 13, 15, 23, 29–37, 77, 86, 241, 243, 247 unsheltered homeless in California, xv, 3–6, 8–11, 28–31, 37–38, 90, 135, 225 homeless population, failure of programs for COVID-19 and hotel housing without accountability, 240–241, 244 lack of leadership and, 244–245 liberal influences on policies, 242–244, 245 neoliberal model of outsourcing services, 243–244 Safe Sleeping Sites and, 241–242 transience of homeless, 243 Housing First cash payments to homeless and, 18–19 conservatives and, 249 dogmatism of, 30, 38 failure to address drug addiction or mental illness, 33–38, 80, 117, 144, 258, 281 housing without conditions and, 9–11, 58 influence on policies, 243, 245, 274 Newsom’s commitment to, 241 opposition to shelters, 28–32, 274, 281 progressives and, 229, 247 housing issues, in California costs, lack of availability, and opposition to building more (NIMBYism), 251–256 immigrants and citizens and move toward progressivism, 248 proposal to end tax credits for uneconomic farms and ranches, 279–280 voter support for enforcement of laws, 281–282 YIMBY movement and, 253–256, 279 How to Increase Homelessness (Roberts), 209 Hughes, Coleman, 285 Humphreys, Dr.

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society
by Thomas Frank
Published 18 Jun 2018

But even if NAFTA is mostly reaffirmed in the end, Trump could use the negotiations to dissuade employers from offshoring jobs—or merely single out some random company and hit it with substantial fines for doing so. That, too, could change the wage equation. Again: it wouldn’t take much, given a business climate like the present, to have some effect. Of course, all of this assumes that Trump’s rhetoric in 2016 was sincere: that he really means to be the country’s “blue-collar billionaire” and to stop what he called, in his famous (if awkward) simile, an “American carnage” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1990

Nevertheless, the government agents and spies are constantly tracing their lineage and former careers, and insisting on their being turned into the streets to make room for the genuine proletariat. As the introduction of capitalism through profit sharing and piecework began to come under fire in the Russian press, there were also other indications that the business climate was changing. The difficulty of obtaining financing in a worsening world economy and the new attitudes of the Soviets toward foreign interests made it a good time to begin negotiating with the Russians for the sale of the factories to the government. Besides, complaints in the press about the large profits of the plants had forced Hammer to drop the prices of his pencils even further.

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Walter Thompson advertising agency explaining the “severance of our business relationship.” It was not the fault of either the agency or its representative, but rather was because Faber was “not in a position to do a sufficient amount of advertising to warrant your continuing to serve us.” In spite of the dark business climate, the company’s five-cent tipped yellow pencil floats proudly in a bright cloud on the letterhead, and the sales manager’s signature, which slants optimistically upward, is signed decisively in pencil, perhaps a Mongol. The Eberhard Faber Mongol in 1932, as it appeared on the company’s letterhead (photo credit 19.2) In 1931 Johann Faber, A.

India's Long Road
by Vijay Joshi
Published 21 Feb 2017

There have been both positive and negative opinions expressed by observers but movement is certainly pointed in the right direction.14 The Department of Industrial Policy is working closely with state governments to help identify constraints on business freedom. A ‘commercial courts bill’ is said to be in the works to set up judicial mechanisms for quicker resolution of commercial disputes. But no improvement has been reported on a major spoiler of the business climate, viz. the arbitrary and high-​handed behaviour of the tax authorities. The government has announced a phased reduction in the corporation tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent over the next few years, along with rationalization/​removal of unnecessary exemptions. This will be a step forward if and when it comes to pass.15 There has been significant liberalization in the limits and procedures for foreign direct investment (see below).

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This will be a step forward if and when it comes to pass.15 There has been significant liberalization in the limits and procedures for foreign direct investment (see below). This is all to the good but the government’s emphasis on ‘ease of doing business’ should not obscure an obvious point: improving the business climate will also depend on making a success of other aspects of the reform process, such as rectifying infrastructure deficits and making factor markets function more smoothly. A more immediate problem is that an investment revival is being hampered by the debt overhang in large parts of the corporate sector and the impaired financial position of the public sector banks (PSBs).

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism
by Sharon Beder
Published 1 Jan 1997

Take, for example, the following Mobil ad: Business, generally, is a good neighbour, and most communities recognize this fact. . .From time to time, out of political motivations or for reasons of radical chic, individuals try to chill the business climate. On such occasions we try to set the record straight. . . And the American system, of which business is an integral part, usually adapts. . . So when it comes to the business climate, we’re glad that most people recognize there’s little need to tinker with the American system.70 Many other companies use advocacy ads, including Union Carbide, the Chase Manhattan Bank, W. R. Grace and Co. and Bethlehem Steel.

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are?
by Chris Rojek
Published 15 Feb 2008

The ‘Third Way’ principles espoused and practised by New Labour sought to generate relevant policies to deal with the central dilemmas of globalization, the new individualism (the retreat of custom and precedent as arbiters of life choice), ecological risks, multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity. The Third Way relied on evidence-based research to identify problems requiring state intervention. The same mechanism was used to monitor the practice of regulation and provide transparency and accountability to the public. A positive business climate for corporations and individual enterprise was encouraged. New Labour’s revitalization of the market principles introduced 182 BRIT-MYTH into the public sector during the Thatcher/Major years symbolized the break with Old Labour policies of centralized management and high taxation. The concordat of 1945 promised a stable new Britain organized around the welfare state.

The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
by Noam Chomsky
Published 24 Oct 2014

U.S. economic interests in the Third World have dictated a policy of containing revolution, preserving an open door for U.S. investment, and assuring favorable conditions of investment. Reformist efforts to improve the lot of the poor and oppressed, including the encouragement of independent trade unions, are not conducive to a favorable climate of investment. Democracy is clearly not conducive to a favorable business climate. As noted by Edward A. Jesser, Jr., chairman of the United Jersey Banks, in a speech to the American Bankers Association: “Quick and tough decisions can be made in a relatively short time in a country such as Brazil compared to the difficulty there is in reaching agreement on what actions to take in a democracy.”39 So much for democracy.

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Grant finds U.S. support for the bloodier dictators “puzzling,” though she notes that “North American, British, and Dutch Oil Companies, vying for prerogatives in Latin America, found dictatorships highly amenable to their courtships.” There is nothing “puzzling” in the support of Nazi-style dictatorships by the country that has taken upon itself the international role of maintaining a favorable climate for oil companies and other corporations. The business climate of Paraguay has not been ideal, with corruption and terror of almost suffocating levels, but on such details the United States is tolerant—especially since, as Arens was informed by his hosts in Paraguay, Stroessner’s is a very anti-Communist regime which “tolerated no iron-curtain embassies or missions and was a haven for U.S. investment, which was not subject to the fluctuations of less carefully regulated markets like North America.”66 Well-taken points.

Road to ruin: an introduction to sprawl and how to cure it
by Dom Nozzi
Published 15 Dec 2003

Most of us are, after all, using our car travel to isolate and wall off ourselves in suburbia from the in-town threat of “strangers,” and sidewalks potentially attract unknown characters to our street. Notwithstanding nationwide examples of how traffic-taming practices (such as narrowing roads) result in overnight improvements to the business climate of a street, businessperson after businessperson vociferously opposes local government effort to create a more livable street. Conservative and liberal alike, we join hands to support road widening and oppose road narrowing—to “ease congestion.” (Ironically, in the face of efforts to restrain excessive, reckless car travel, which are actually in the best interests of the motoring public, our knee-jerk, “commonsense” conclusion is that such restraint is detrimental.

The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News,in Politics, and inLife
by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
Published 26 Dec 2008

It was judged incorrect in temperate countries, correct in very cold countries (where putting in “more windows” was assumed to mean more layers of glazing—triple-glazing is common), and a stupid question in very hot countries (why would you want to stop heat from escaping from a building?). International rankings are proliferating. We can now read how the United States compares with other countries on quality of governance, business climate, health, education, transport, and innovation, to name a few, as well as more frivolous surveys like an international happiness index—”the world grump league,” as one tabloid reported it. “Welcome,” says Christopher Hood from Oxford University, who leads a research project into international comparisons, “to Ranking World.”

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market
by John Allen Paulos
Published 1 Jan 2003

Whatever the validity of these beliefs and of technical analysis in general (and I’ll get to this shortly), I must admit to an a priori distaste for the herdish behavior it often seems to counsel: Figure out where the pack is going and follow it. It was this distaste, perhaps, that prevented me from selling WCOM and that caused me to sputter continually to myself that the company was the victim of bad public relations, investor misunderstanding, media bashing, anger at the CEO, a poisonous business climate, unfortunate timing, or panic selling. In short, I thought the crowd was wrong and hated the idea that it must be obeyed. As I slowly learned, however, disdaining the crowd is sometimes simply hubris. Technical Analysis: Following the Followers My own prejudices aside, the justification for technical analysis is murky at best.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
by Johan Norberg
Published 31 Aug 2016

In the 1980s they suffered a debt crisis, and it has taken the region a long time to recover. Between 1981 and 2000, while the East Asian economy doubled in size, the African economy did not grow at all. However, many African countries brought spending and inflation under control and began to improve the business climate. Many armed conflicts ended. Since then, growth has picked up strongly. A continent once synonymous with stagnation has grown by around five per cent annually since 2000. It is often assumed that this was just a commodity boom, but natural resources generated just a third of the growth, with the rest coming from sectors such as manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation and retail.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

As Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, this young woman from New Jersey could intuitively sense the market opportunity. Companies that were emerging from the desolation of the Soviet-style command economy toward a market-driven one needed advice and guidance on capital sourcing and restructuring. This market-sensing and gutsy woman launched her business in an industry—and business climate—dominated by men. As described earlier, Spengler has all the dynamism, confidence, and tenacity of the Driver. But she has considerably more. She has emerged as a master builder, taking on the mission awareness of the Crusader and the advanced leadership skills of a Captain. In many respects, Spengler’s motivation was that of a Crusader: “I wanted to contribute to a world that is not bifurcated between commercial results and philanthropy,” she says, “but rather to advance business models and enable people to see that the world can be a blend of the best of both.”

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

The reality of running an organization in the future will be that the more algorithms take over management, the more we will need leadership to bring in human judgment to help set priorities. If this is the case, then we see a similar story emerge, as we did in the past, where we emphasized that the running of an organization requires managers and leaders to work together to create both innovative and sustainable ways of doing business. In today’s business climate, we again see this pattern emerge through algorithms taking care of management and humans accounting for the leadership responsibilities. This idea indicates that the way to run organizations in the future will be to follow a collaboration model, where algorithms and humans jointly create value.

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People
by Joe Navarro and Toni Sciarra Poynter
Published 6 Oct 2014

The “BTK killer” Dennis Rader was a church leader and a reliable city employee who used his knowledge of the city and the mobility his job afforded him to target his victims. Then there are the corporate predators, who can be found in large institutions as well as in two-person operations. Some say that today’s business climate, particularly the high-stakes, cutthroat world of finance, attracts and rewards predatory behavior. These individuals may be charismatic and interesting, but they can also place a company at risk through their impulsive, aggressive behavior. That’s exactly what Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are famous for having done at Enron.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Jan 2016

In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we’re now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist. Bad for Business. Good for You. Deep work should be a priority in today’s business climate. But it’s not. I’ve just summarized various explanations for this paradox. Among them are the realities that deep work is hard and shallow work is easier, that in the absence of clear goals for your job, the visible busyness that surrounds shallow work becomes self-preserving, and that our culture has developed a belief that if a behavior relates to “the Internet,” then it’s good—regardless of its impact on our ability to produce valuable things.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

Keynes Offers a Drastic Measure to Stabilize Capitalism The Cambridge leader was not satisfied with temporary measures such as public works and deficit spending to reestablish full employment. Once maximum output was reached, he reasoned, there is no reason to believe it will stay there. Investment is unpredictable and ephemeral, Keynes said. Long-term expectations, a stable business climate, and savings equal to investment could never be guaranteed as long as irrational "animal spirits" operated in a laissez-faire financial marketplace. What was Keynes's solution? He favored a gradual but comprehensive "socialisation of investment" as the "only means of securing an approximation to full employment" (1973a, 378).

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
by Juliet B. Schor
Published 12 May 2010

Environmental protection has been pitted against growth, incomes, jobs, and well-being. The thinking has been short-term, and the basic assumption is that interventions do not shift the frontier out but either move us along it or, even worse, push us inside by skewing incentives and undermining the business climate. Is the assumption that we’re on the curve with respect to ecological limits the right one? Since the downturn began, the answer has obviously been no. In a recession, workers are idle, businesses are running below capacity, and we’re operating inside the frontier. That’s why there were fewer economists than usual opposing stimulus dollars for green-jobs proposals.

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
by Richard Florida
Published 28 Jun 2009

The status quo orientation and don’t-rock-the-boat values of those regions may damp down creativity and innovation in those regions as well as encourage an out migration of the open types who tend to be the source of new creative energy and innovation. Thus the longer-run issues facing these regions may have as much to do with their psychological makeup, or what Rentfrow calls their “psychosocial environment,” as their business climate and economic structure. There are several other reasons why personalities might cluster. The first of these, as Rentfrow and Gosling explain, has to do with the physical environment. It is widely acknowledged that physical environments shape cultures and societies. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond points out the physical attributes that shaped the propulsive growth of northern Europe.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
by Kimberly Clausing
Published 4 Mar 2019

A healthy business community generates good job opportunities, a steady stream of innovation, and a dizzying array of affordable consumer options. A healthy, prosperous society helps business, providing thriving customer markets, a well-educated labor force, and the stable, inclusive institutions and policies that make for a good business climate. Is New Zealand the Best Place to do Business? According to the World Bank, New Zealand is the best place to start a business, and the easiest place to run one.1 But if you are unprepared to move across the world, don’t despair: the United States does well by many measures. The United States ranked sixth for ease of doing business, and the World Economic Forum determined that the United States is the world’s second most competitive economy.2 The US rank is buttressed by highly sophisticated businesses, a huge market, innovation, and strong institutions of higher education, overcoming the negative effects of relatively poor infrastructure and primary education. ________________________ 1.  

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

More importantly, temperatures are dreadfully low for a large part of the year, with the thermometer dropping as far as -41 degrees. This environment could cool data centres naturally, thereby reducing cloud companies’ electricity consumption and costs. What Matz Engman had on offer was the cold.26 Sweden’s far-north business ‘climate’ was very suitable to the FAANGs, in all senses of the word. Listening to Engman’s pitch, Facebook’s representatives purportedly exclaimed, ‘We love this place!’ The firm contacted the Swedish government in September 2010. It wasn’t looking just to expand its infrastructure; it wanted to sell the story of an eco-responsible company which, to ‘save’ the climate, would gamble on setting up a ‘100 per cent green data centre’ in one of the most inhospitable regions in the world.

Birth of the Euro
by Otmar Issing
Published 20 Oct 2008

In the short to medium term, prices are determined by non-monetary factors such as wages (unit labour costs), the exchange rate, energy and import prices, indirect taxes, etc. Indicators of developments in the real economy include data on employment and unemployment, data from surveys (such as the Ifo Business Climate Index), incoming orders, and so on. This economic analysis also encompasses financial sector data such as the yield curve, stock prices and real estate prices. Asset price trends can yield information, for example, on how the wealth effect is expected to influence the growth of demand of private households.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green
Published 17 Jul 2017

He presides over the corruption and lack of progress that is Albany. While there is plenty of good news here for Cuomo, there is little guarantee that he will escape the misfortunes of 2014 that may be visited on Democrats (thanks to Obamacare), and his own man-made problems plaguing New York (including high taxes and a poor business climate, and a “lack of frack”). Rather than kill off the idea of Trump running for governor, Conway’s memo had the opposite effect. “She thought that it was possible for him to win New York,” said Caputo. Stone called Conway’s analysis “an enormous crock of shit,” and Bossie a “major douchebag devoid of any political talent—and that’s on the record.”

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

Path dependency and strong forces of agglomeration present serious challenges for communities without a well-educated labor force and an established innovation sector. Local governments can certainly lay a foundation for economic development and create all the necessary conditions for a city’s rebirth, including a business climate friendly to job creation, but there is no magic formula for redevelopment. Like politics, all innovation is local: each community has its own comparative advantage. Local governments must build on their existing capabilities by leveraging local strengths and expertise. The use of public funds to create jobs must be reserved for cases where there are important market failures and a community has a credible chance of building a self-sustaining cluster.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

As early as mid-September 2015, the total value of large (over $10 billion) transactions reached $1.19 trillion, breaking the previous record from the dot-com bubble of 1999. So the cash piles of corporations are going somewhere, just not always into creating new ideas. Companies would rather buy up other, already established companies than try to succeed with new ideas or their own new product lines. That is another sign of how our contemporary business climate, like our broader society, is more about stability than most media stories let on.14 FEWER AMERICANS DIRECTLY INVOLVED IN INNOVATION Another way of thinking about corporate innovation is to look at how much companies spend explicitly toward that goal, namely research and development expenditures.

The Zero-Waste Lifestyle: Live Well by Throwing Away Less
by Amy Korst
Published 26 Dec 2012

Customers can eat their meals with the real deal, then return used utensils to a station staffed by volunteers. The FSSM group has contracted with a food vendor that provides weekly washing in a commercial kitchen. So far, the utensils program has been a great success. The zero-waste movement is all about taking responsibility for one’s own trash, and this is a remarkable thing. In today’s business climate, in which profit reigns supreme, it is admirable for these many companies to stand up and collectively say they will work to clean up their own mess. Ultimately there are many benefits to adopting zero waste. After an initial transition period, zero-waste companies tend to operate with fewer expenses.

Au Contraire: Figuring Out the French
by Gilles Asselin and Ruth Mastron
Published 1 Dec 2000

They need to show you they are made of stern intellectual stuff, and they usually do this in a combative, in-your-face way. Paradoxically, they can also be charming while they’re doing it. The French usually begin a business negotiation by “setting the stage” with a series of general considerations and statements before getting down to the details. For example, they want to discuss the general business climate, economic trends, market conditions, competing companies, and industry sales figures before discussing the financial details of the proposal. The inclusion of considerable background information is important to the French because they like to know exactly where they stand at all times, and where they are going.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

They didn’t understand the Internet’s power; it had no place in their landscape of power, and no familiar analogue existed that would make it easy to grasp. Mitch Kapor noted in an April 2012 interview, “Nobody in Washington DC took [the Internet] seriously, so it was allowed to happen. By the time anybody noticed, it had already won.”23 In effect, the Internet was released into the wild in a strong pro-business climate pushed by conservatives who wanted one big institution—government—to get out of free markets. The following year, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which deregulated the radio spectrum, allowing, among other things, the rise of huge media conglomerates like Clear Channel (paradoxical, I know).

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity Into Prosperity
by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne
Published 4 Feb 2013

At the moment we were ready to take off, there was a change in government,” recalls Van Arkel. Currently, what is operational in Uruguay and El Salvador is a subset version of the full-blown C3 program. Koen de Beer, project manager for STRO in El Salvador, makes an interesting observation about the business climate in South America in comparison with the United States or Europe. “Something that has fascinated me is there are so many businesses and entrepreneurial activities here. When I was living in Europe, you think about setting up a business, and after 10 minutes you decide not to do it because there are so many rules, regulations, and laws.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

“You can be a manager of capitalist society or a founder of a socialist society,” Mitterrand could say. “As far as we’re concerned, we want to be the second.”27 By the time Mitterrand took power with Communist support in 1981, France already faced growing unemployment, economic stagnation, and an unfavorable international business climate. Despite his rhetoric, Mitterrand’s immediate program was a radical Keynesian one. His “110 Propositions for France” proposed a public works program and the construction of social housing, nurseries, and clinics. The government’s early legislative victories expanded shop-floor union rights, along with codetermination measures.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
by Kevin Dutton
Published 15 Oct 2012

Investment scams, conflicts of interest, lapses of judgment, and those evergreen entrepreneurial party tricks of good old fraud and embezzlement are now utterly unprecedented. Both in scope and in fiscal magnitude. Corporate-governance analysts cite a confluence of reasons for today’s sullied business climate. Avarice, of course—the backbone of Gordon Gekkoism—is one of them. But also in the mix is so-called guerrilla accounting. As Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange expected continued gains and the speed and complexity of business increased exponentially, rule-bending and obfuscation suddenly became de rigueur.

Au Contraire!: Figuring Out the French
by Gilles Asselin and Ruth Mastron
Published 14 Apr 2001

They need to show you they are made of stern intellectual stuff, and they usually do this in a combative, in-your-face way. Paradoxically, they can also be charming while they’re doing it. The French usually begin a business negotiation by “setting the stage” with a series of general considerations and statements before getting down to the details. For example, they want to discuss the general business climate, economic trends, market conditions, competing companies, and industry sales figures before discussing the financial details of the proposal. The inclusion of considerable background information is important to the French because they like to know exactly where they stand at all times, and where they are going.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Most ingenious was the Swedish entrepreneur who managed to collect as many as thirty-eight different grants between 1997 and 2013.23 Imagine how much such inventive people could have contributed to the national economy if they had had incentives to seek markets instead of grants and were paid for innovations instead of capital destruction. All this turns industrial policy into a boulevard of broken dreams. What is so sad is that there are a number of initiatives that could create a much better business climate: legal security, efficient bureaucracies, good infrastructure, the freedom to build, good education systems and liberal labour immigration. Instead of investing energy and political capital in creating these conditions, politicians run off to pick specific business models to support. As Josh Lerner points out, it’s kind of like serving the main course without first setting the table – it allows you to focus on the most fun activity, but you ruin the whole dinner.

Understanding Power
by Noam Chomsky
Published 26 Jul 2010

It depends where you’re looking. You don’t win what you’d like to win, but you could have lost a lot more. For example, take El Salvador in the 1980s. The purpose of U.S. policies there was to wipe out the popular organizations and support a traditional Latin American-style regime that would ensure the kind of business climate we expect in the region. So the independent press was destroyed, the political opposition was murdered, priests and labor organizers were murdered, and so on and so forth—and U.S. planners figured they had the problem licked. Well, today it’s right back, it’s right back where it was. New people came up, the organizations are forming again.

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So if you read the small left-wing press in the United States back in 1937, they were reporting this all the time, but the big American newspapers just have never had the resources to find out about things like this, so they never said a word. 63 I mean, years later people writing diplomatic history sort of mention these facts in the margins—but at the time there was nothing in the mainstream. 64 And that’s exactly what we just saw in Haiti: the American press would not tell people that the U.S. was actively undermining the sanctions, that there never were any sanctions, and that the U.S. was simply trying to get back the old pre-Aristide business climate once again—which was pretty much achieved. Averting Democracy in Italy MAN: Noam, since you mentioned the U.S. opposing popular democracy and supporting fascist-type structures in Spain and Haiti—I just want to point out that that also happened in Italy, France, Greece, and other allied Western countries after World War II.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016

Instead, I told them, enduring success in the new people-driven, place-based economy turned on doing the smaller things that made cities great places to live and work—things like making sure there were walkable, pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, parks, exciting art and music scenes, and vibrant areas where people could gather in cafés and restaurants. Cities needed more than a competitive business climate; they also needed a great people climate that appealed to individuals and families of all types—single, married, with children or without, straight or gay. In time, my work generated a considerable following among mayors, arts and cultural leaders, urbanists, and even some enlightened real estate developers who were looking for a better way to spur urban development in their communities.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

To the extent that systemic choices are available, they lie on a spectrum that runs from the market-driven model of capitalism in the US, via the social democratic models of Europe, to the heavily statist, authoritarian form of capitalism that prevails in China and much of the rest of the developing world – a model nonetheless characterised by extensive exposure to the global trading system. Does this mean that the general discontent with capitalism will ensure a permanent anti-business climate and policy that is inimical to economic growth? I sincerely hope not. Having pondered these questions over a 45-year career in journalism and in business, I am, with caveats, pro-business and pro-capitalism. For, in the end, it is the efforts of business people working within a market system that have lifted millions from poverty all across the world over the past two and a half centuries.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke
by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi
Published 17 Aug 2004

Hospitals began discharging patients “quicker and sicker,” expecting the family to pick up the task of nursing them back to health. With Mom in the workforce, parents were faced with a painful choice between paying for expensive care and taking time off work. At the same time, the divorce rate continued its upward climb. This situation was compounded by a leaner-and-meaner business climate that closed plants and laid off workers with alarming frequency. In this tougher world, millions of two-income families learned the price of living without a safety net. Inevitably, the Two-Income Trap affected the one-income family too. When millions of mothers entered the workforce, they ratcheted up the price of a middle-class life for everyone, including families that wanted to keep Mom at home.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

For the ninth year, Forbes magazine ranked 146 nations on eleven different factors to produce a list of the “Best Countries for Business.” For the fourth time (2008, 2009, 2010, 2014) Denmark came up in first place. According to John Weis, an economist at Moody’s Analytics with an expertise on the Danish economy, Denmark’s pro-business climate stems in large part due to its long-standing policy of “Flexicurity,” a multi-pronged approach supported by the European Commission. Flexicurity combines flexible and reliable contractual arrangements with lifelong learning strategies and adequate social benefits, supporting the needs of both employers and employees.

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less
by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou
Published 15 Feb 2015

In 2013, Caterpillar announced the expansion of its US operations with the construction of a 600,000 square foot hydraulic excavator manufacturing facility in Victoria, Texas. Once operational, the plant will employ more than 500 people and triple its US-based excavator capacity. Gary Stampanato, a vice-president at Caterpillar, says:6 Victoria’s proximity to our supply base, access to ports and other transportation, as well as the positive business climate in Texas, made this the ideal site for this project. In late 2009, NCR, a US electronics company, announced it was bringing its ATM (automated teller machine) production back to Columbus, Georgia, to decrease time to market, increase internal collaboration and lower operating costs. Even low-value toy manufacturers are going this way.

I Love Capitalism!: An American Story
by Ken Langone
Published 14 May 2018

All Bernie and Arthur needed, I figured, was a year: a year to study America and figure out where the first stores should be opened and how close to the ideal the stores could come. I calculated that the initial stage would take a couple million dollars in venture capital—to pay Bernie and Arthur’s salaries and fringe benefits and enable them to come up with a detailed business plan. The problem, in May 1978, was that the business climate was lousy. Jimmy Carter was president, and national confidence was sagging. Interest rates were climbing; energy prices and inflation were out of control. Not the best moment to drum up confidence in a daring new venture. I needed a contrarian with a couple million dollars lying around. Who else but Ross Perot?

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
by Hamish McKenzie
Published 30 Sep 2017

China, with unique challenges from governmental and cultural quarters, is a difficult place for American tech companies to do business. Many have come and failed, including Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Groupon, and Uber, to name a few of the most prominent. Such companies have been brought low through a combination of hubris, lack of familiarity with the business climate, and misjudging local tastes. In some cases—Google’s, especially—they haven’t worked well with the Chinese government (the guanxi weren’t adequately lubricated). There were some early signs that Tesla was making some of the same mistakes. For example, it initially overlooked wealthy Chinese consumers’ unique tastes.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

He said, “Just by instituting digital signatures, we saved 2% of our GDP,” and “by digitizing our voting, all the young people started voting.” Apparently, young people would rather check boxes on their mobile phones than go into some antiquated creepy booth. He went on to discuss Estonia’s digital identity program, which lowered the crime rate and improved the business climate in his country. He bestowed on me the third virtual residency of Estonia. Now, without even setting foot in Estonia, I can open a European bank account in less than 24 hours (I did this), buy European real estate, and do business digitally anywhere in Europe. I recently completed a financing with Kaidi Ruusalep of Funderbeam, a company that provides liquidity to private companies in Estonia.

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein
Published 18 May 2020

It also developed using elements of the high-wage model. While they became increasingly underpaid relative to the value of what they produced during the Industrial Revolution, British workers nevertheless continued to command higher pay than workers in much of the rest of Europe. Their high productivity and the favorable business climate pulled in capital from abroad, which allowed investment spending to consistently exceed national saving until after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The difference was covered by the Dutch, who are estimated to have paid for about a third of Britain’s total investment in the eighteenth century.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors
by Edward Niedermeyer
Published 14 Sep 2019

“This sounds impossible—both the idea of building cars in the first place, and further, the idea of building a high performance electric car.” But, argued Eberhard, two recent developments now made the impossible possible: new battery technology made electric cars “very attractive,” and “the international business climate makes it now possible to build a ‘fab-less’ car company—a car company without a factory.” By avoiding the staggering fixed costs associated with building and tooling a car factory, Tesla could turn the economics of the car business upside down. This belief was rooted in a real auto industry trend that been developing for some time.

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley
by Atsuo Inoue
Published 18 Nov 2021

Up until now, Son had only explained his plan for the company in general terms; Hong’s first task would be drawing up a three-year plan for the company. The request blindsided him, but he was prepared to give it everything he had and promptly put all of his effort into coming up with the plan. The business climate would be impossible to predict. And the exact features of the translation device had yet to be determined as well. Hong flashes a wry smile as he reflects back on the task. ‘I’d been racking my brains over the three-year plan. It was my job, after all. However, I had completely forgotten to take those sorts of things into consideration.’

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

And no society, no matter how well financed or managed, can truly adapt to massive natural disasters when one comes fast and furious on the heels of the last. II. In early 2011, Joe Read, a newly elected representative to the Montana state legislature, made history by introducing the first bill to officially declare climate change a good thing. “Global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana,” the bill stated. Read explained, “Even if it does get warmer, we’re going to have a longer growing season. It could be very beneficial to the state of Montana. Why are we going to stop this progress?” The bill did not pass. III. In a telling development, the American Freedom Alliance hosted its own conference challenging the reality of climate change in Los Angeles in June 2011.

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Lauren also did dynamite research for the billionaires chapter. Dave Oswald Mitchell contributed wise and comprehensive research on the growth imperative, and Mara Kardas-Nelson did the same on local power movements in Germany and Boulder. Rajiv and I are also deeply grateful to the team of very busy climate scientists who agreed to read sections of the book relating to climate change impacts and projections. Our readers ended up being an all-star cast of scientific experts including: Kevin Anderson (Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research), Alice Bows-Larkin (Tyndall Centre), James Hansen (Columbia University), Peter Gleick (Pacific Institute), and Sivan Kartha (Stockholm Environment Institute), all of whom vetted large sections of the book for accuracy.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 10 Nov 2011

China would have to make all of the adjustments, with regard to their currency, their social safety net and twenty-five hundred years of Confucian culture, while the United States would do nothing and reap the benefits of increased net exports to a fast-growing internal Chinese market. This was a particularly soft option for the United States. It required no tangible effort by the United States to improve its business climate by reducing corporate taxes and regulation, providing for sound money or promoting savings and investment. Some of what the United States wanted may have been in China’s best interests, but China could not be blamed for believing it was being bullied on behalf of a U.S. plan that above all suited the United States.

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa
by Calestous Juma
Published 27 May 2017

Finally, a more vibrant agricultural sector can help to expand the markets for inputs and services for the nonagricultural sectors.55 It is clear why the African Union is prioritizing agriculture, taking a holistic approach and focusing on improving food security and nutrition, promoting agro-­ processing and the business climate, introducing aquaculture and livestock programs, and improving mechanization.56 Advancements in science have demonstrated the important role that niche crops can play in improving human health in sub-Saharan Africa specifically. Achieving food security depends not only on increasing production but also on improving nutrition.

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Apr 2012

Very often it is businessmen and financiers who sustain expensive restaurants. Today the financial capital of Germany is Frankfurt, not Berlin. Berlin also does not have wealthy multilateral institutions to sustain its fine dining scene, as do Geneva and Brussels and Washington, D.C. What Berlin does have is remarkably cheap rents. Because of the weak business climate in the city, there are not so many jobs. A disproportionate share of the population either works for the government or receives subsidy income from the government; or young people live there while they try their hand at art, design, music, and so on. That supports cultural riches, but the city itself is not economically vital.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
by Laurence Gonzales
Published 1 Dec 1998

They are coldly rational about using the world, obtaining what they need, doing what they have to do. 12. Never give up (let nothing break your spirit). There is always one more thing that you can do. Survivors are not easily frustrated. They are not discouraged by setbacks. They accept that the environment (or the business climate or their health) is constantly changing. They pick themselves up and start the entire process over again, breaking it down into manageable bits. Survivors always have a clear reason for going on. They keep their spirits up by developing an alternate world made up of rich memories to which they can escape.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
by Michael Lewis
Published 29 Sep 1999

Instead, Mike Long had sat down with a handful of large institutional investors that the Morgan Stanley bankers felt would lead public opinion about the company. Long had decided in his mind that he deserved some of the blame for the failure of the IPO the first time around. ''The story in the fall was too complex," he said. He had learned that, in a business climate that changed as rapidly as this one did, no one on the outside had time to "study the details" of the business. That was a polite way of saying that a lot of potential investors had no idea what Healtheon actually did. Healtheon, like a lot of Internet companies, was an ever-shifting abstraction.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

Mcgilvray, Natural Resource and Environmental Economics, London, Pearson Education, 2011. 13 See for example Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, Better Growth, Better Climate, and the conclusions of the Business and Climate Summit, May 2015, http://www.businessclimatesummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Business-Climate-Summit-Press-release.pdf (accessed 14 April 2016). 14 See P. M. Romer, ‘The origins of endogenous growth’, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 8, no. 1, 1994, pp. 3–22, doi:10.1257/jep.8.1.3. JSTOR 2138148. See also D. Acemoglu, Endogenous Technological Change. Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. pp. 411–533.

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
by Gillian Tett
Published 11 May 2009

You have to think about communication,” Black later observed with a wry, knowing smile. “At the beginning, we were just too polite to each other. But then we learnt to communicate better, as we went along. We just talked, talked, and talked.” The task facing them was daunting. On paper, the wider business climate in 2004 should have been playing to all of J.P. Morgan’s strengths. The new decade was shaping up to be the Era of Credit, and credit was supposed to be J.P. Morgan’s strength. By late 2004, the bank could still claim a leading position in the trading of interest-rate derivatives, foreign exchange, and corporate loans, and a respectable operation in the arena of corporate bonds, too.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

Between 1840 and 1880 the railway network would expand by a factor of ten, faster even than the British railways.2 Meanwhile, new industrial mining techniques allowed Belgian firms to tap the country’s mineral resources, which found ready markets in the expanding industrial economies of France and Germany. The booming Belgian business climate of the mid-nineteenth century spurred a generation of ambitious young men to seek out new opportunities. Among their ranks was Édouard Otlet, a businessman’s son who grew up in the aftermath of Belgian independence. His son Paul later described him this way: “My father was part of the generation that came of age immediately after the 1830 revolution,” he wrote.

Celebration of Fools: An Inside Look at the Rise and Fall of JCPenney
by Bill Hare
Published 30 May 2004

Celebration of Fools is an insider's look at JCPenney's remarkable rise and fall, charting the people and events that have been the history of this American institution. Packed with captivating stories and compelling characters--including the company's highest ranking woman--Celebration of Fools offers valuable lessons applicable in today's business climate. With an engaging, narrative style, former Penney executive speechwriter Bill Hare tells a compelling cautionary tale with universal implications for all of corporate America. Casting new light and astonishing revelations on this American icon and the people who nearly destroyed it, Celebration of Fools will keep readers captivated from first page till last.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
by Tim Fernholz
Published 20 Mar 2018

The government’s whole plan had relied on being a secondary user of the new rockets, with a robust commercial space industry paying down the costs of development. But that market had simply not materialized. The biggest, most attractive satellite plays—Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat, and Teledesic—had all gone bankrupt at the turn of the century as the dot-com bubble popped and Wall Street balked at capital-intensive technology plays. The business climate for satellite communications was still going from bad to worse. Growing cell phone penetration presented a cheaper, more effective alternative to the bulky and often balky satellite phone. Undersea fiber-optic cables ate into the business of providing international communications links from space.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

Exports, as a Percentage of GDP,” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/258779/us-exports-as-a-percentage-of-gdp/. 70. Klaus Schwab, “The Global Competitiveness Report 2018,” World Economic Forum, 2018. 71. “Infrastructure,” Germany Trade and Invest GmbH (GTAI), www.gtai.de/GTAI/Navigation/EN/Invest/Business-location-germany/Business-climate/infrastructure.html. 72. Hermann Simon, “Why Germany Still Has So Many Middle-Class Manufacturing Jobs,” Harvard Business Review (July 13, 2017), https://hbr.org/2017/05/why-germany-still-has-so-many-middle-class-manufacturing-jobs?referral=03759&cm_vc=rr_item_page.bottom. 73. Tamar Jacoby, “Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers,” Atlantic, Oct. 20, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-germany-is-so-much-better-at-training-its-workers/381550/. 74.

The Power Makers
by Maury Klein
Published 26 May 2008

Both Edison and Westinghouse found themselves squeezed not only by the bitter competition in the industry but also by a deteriorating financial climate that shifted their attention from safety to the more basic problem of survival. The failure in November 1890 of the prestigious London banking firm Baring Brothers sent financial markets into turmoil and led to a sell-off of American securities by British holders. As gold flowed out of the United States, credit grew tighter and an already slow business climate grew gloomier. In this darkening atmosphere the fierce competition among the three leading electrical firms could not help but bruise them even more severely.67 CHAPTER 14 MONEY, MERGERS, AND MOTORS With the advent of the dynamo electricity has taken a new and very much larger place in the commercial activities of the world.

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A large portion of its assets consisted of the securities taken from utilities by both Thomson-Houston and Edison General Electric in exchange for equipment. Their value dropped steadily in a declining market, and few customers were prompt in making cash payments on their equipment in a deteriorating business climate. This left GE with a treasury full of securities on which it could not realize any cash. As its floating debt mounted, Wall Street buzzed with rumors of financial weakness. During the winter of 1893, even before the depression hit in earnest, bears began to hammer GE stock, claiming that its “policy of crushing out opposition is leading to complications which must eventually do the company more harm than good, because of animosities and hostile legislation which it is arousing.”27 That April, in the company’s first annual report, Charles Coffin tried to put the best possible spin on the financial situation.

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 24 May 2010

If the central bank had a policy of inducing high inflation, producers would rationally expect that all prices would go up and would not exert more effort when they saw the prices of their own products go up. Rather, they would understand that the additional dollar they earned was actually worth less in terms of its ability to purchase goods and services. The long-run level of employment of the economy would be determined by factors like the business climate, incentives to innovate, and the ability of firms to hire or lay off workers easily, not by inflation. This view eliminated the incompatibility in the long run between the economic goals of low inflation and maximum sustainable employment. According to the new orthodoxy, by keeping inflation low and thus eliminating all the uncertainty and distortions associated with high and variable inflation, central bankers would give the economy its best chance of achieving its potential growth rate and thus maximum sustainable employment.

Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 22 Dec 2005

The United States and other Western countries tend to put a high premium on holding elections to provide greater legitimacy for those in authority. Under the best of circumstances, elections can be a means of coalition-building and reconciliation. Great significance is also given to agreement on a constitution that parcels out powers and enshrines rights. Laws that create a marketfriendly business climate and protect investors usually get high marks. But many of these measures can, in fact, convey a false picture of progress and even set back the recovery process. Elections that are poorly planned or rushed can be discredited and prove to be destabilizing. By their nature, contentious elections can create stresses that the political system may not be prepared to handle.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
Published 10 Jun 2013

As federal and state resources diminished, private and civic investment would increase, unlocking not only capital but expertise. Imagine, finally, if metros aggregated their political power to bend state and federal policies and investments to their pragmatic, distinctive visions of advanced industries, global trade, transformative infrastructure, and skilled workers. States would compete not just over their tax or business climate but also over the extent to which they were fully supportive of their metropolitan engines. Metro Deals would proliferate throughout the country, substituting imaginative and productive solutions for legislative obstructionism and inaction. Representative democracy in the service of place and people rather than party or ideology would triumph.

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
Published 23 Jul 2009

And of course they knew that there were limits—they just couldn’t see them. This was a failure on management’s part; the truth is, we have consistently struggled with how we set useful limits and also how we make them visible. Many of our limits are imposed not by our internal processes but by external realities—finite resources, deadlines, a shifting economy or business climate. Those things, we can’t control. But the limits we impose internally, if deployed correctly, can be a tool to force people to amend the way they are working and, sometimes, to invent another way. The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
by William R. Easterly
Published 1 Aug 2002

For example, Brazil moved more slowly into the computer revolution than necessary because of a government ban on PC imports, a misguidedattempttopromotethedomestic PC industry,a classic attempt by vested interests to hijack technological progress. In general, imitation responds to the same kind of incentives that innovationdoes. The governmentshouldsubsidize technological imitation because it brings benefits to other firms in the economy besides the imitator.And of course, the business climate has to favor foreign direct investment and imports of machines, not to mention entrepreneurs in general. Bangalore Bangalore, India, is the capitalof Karnataka state in the southIndia. It’s an inland plateaucity, long famous for its refreshing climate and manygardens. It wasasleepy place wherehoneymooners and retirees went to get away.36 But gardening is not whatBangalore is famous for today.

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values
by Sharon Beder
Published 30 Sep 2006

Friedman was credited with being the leader of the Chicago School economists and was taken up and promoted by Hayek-inspired networks: ‘more than anyone else, he was responsible for reviving’ and popularizing free market ideas.16 For many years these free market economic ideas were considered marginal and obsolete in other universities. But they gradually moved from the margins of economic thought towards the centre of orthodoxy because these ideas became useful to business interests seeking to minimize government interference in their activities; achieve a better low-tax business climate; and expand markets into realms PRO-BUSINESS POLICIES AS IDEOLOGY 97 of government business. Both Hayek and Friedman received Nobel prizes in the 1970s. Friedman went on to be an adviser to several government leaders, including US Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and, most controversially, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who had overthrown the democratically elected Allende government (see Chapter 10).17 MONETARISM AND THE NATURAL RATE OF UNEMPLOYMENT Friedman was most closely identified with monetarism, a theory that had been discredited following the Great Depression.18 Its renewed appeal in the 1970s came because it claimed to explain the stagflation that many countries were experiencing.

Tower of Basel: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank That Runs the World
by Adam Lebor
Published 28 May 2013

The BIS is a unique institution: an international organization, an extremely profitable bank and a research institute founded, and protected, by international treaties.14 The BIS is accountable to its customers and shareholders—the central banks—but also guides their operations. The main tasks of a central bank, the BIS argues, are to control the flow of credit and the volume of currency in circulation, which will ensure a stable business climate, and to keep exchange rates within manageable bands to ensure the value of a currency and so smooth international trade and capital movements. This is crucial, especially in a globalized economy, where markets react in microseconds and perceptions of economic stability and value are almost as important as reality itself.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

Hams were the first to show the value and utility of wireless community networking.”56 Hendricks pointed out in our recent communications that ham radio operators have had a little-publicized global wireless data communication network running for some time—which came into play after the terrorist events of September 11 to support emergency communications in lower Manhattan. In 1996, the U.S. State Department and the National Science Foundation, seeking to promote democracy and a good business climate in Mongolia as it emerged from communist rule, heard about Hughes’s experiments with wireless Internet access in rural Colorado and asked him to bring wireless broadband to Ulan Bator. Hughes knew just who to contact—Dewayne Hendricks, who went to Mongolia and networked seven institutions, up to ten kilometers away from the country’s sole Internet feed, in ten days.

Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman
by Ken Auletta
Published 28 Sep 2015

He moved into Peterson’s suite of offices, claiming the corner office with its panoramic view of New York Harbor. Up on the walls and bookshelves went the bright red fire chief’s hat, the pictures of clipper ships and fish, the tool catalogues, the books on maritime warfare and marine life. Yet Lew Glucksman felt no joy. He was worried about the weakened business climate, about liquidity, his partners’ unhappiness with how he was managing the firm, the personal insecurity of partners, their desire to participate in a single transaction that would net each a handsome premium. All of these factors came together at the same time that he realized his life’s dream of becoming chairman of Lehman Brothers.

The Fiume Crisis
by Dominique Kirchner Reill
Published 1 Dec 2020

Even Minister Bellasich, so outraged about the Hungarian-­language supply order, built his c­ areer (both before and a­ fter 1920) on his fluency in Italian and Hungarian, a fact noted by the 1970s Italian encyclopedia entry emphasizing that “during World War Two he held positions of trust for the Italian government in relation to Hungary, thanks to his economic and linguistic background.”23 Multilingualism helped push through paperwork, negotiate trade contracts, and neutralize disputes among a diverse body politic. The head of the tobacco factory refused to punish Szécsey for one of the skills most valued in the Fiume business climate, and leniency again proved the rule of the Fiume language politics game, even when Italian nationalist fervor was official policy. A Sense of Self 183 On the most basic level, Szécsey’s relatively tolerated language misstep reminds us once more that even as Gabriele D’Annunzio was insisting that Fiume was “the most Italian of cities,” t­here was a much wider assortment of Fiumians than the Italian nationalist fanfare admitted.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

“Boulware believed that it was not enough to win over company employees on narrow labor issues,” writes Thomas Evans in his history of Reagan’s GE years. “They must not only accept the offer but pass on GE’s essentially conservative message to others, helping the company to win voters at the grassroots who would elect officials and pass legislation establishing a better business climate.”5 Ronnie practiced the Speech and learned about the free-market thinkers and the true evils of communism. In 1962, with Boulware retired, he went freelance, voicing campaigns against gun regulation and socialized medicine. By the mid-1960s, Reagan had put a decade of practice into the role of conservative spokesman, and he was among the movement’s best.

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Recall the origins of the railroad crisis in the 1870s: too many roads to too few locations. Like the web, the tracks weren’t built for price competition; they were monopolistic plans, and that made them brittle. “You’re either a zero or a one. Alive or dead,” repeats the Tim Robbins version of Bill Gates in Antitrust, describing both the Valley’s business climate and its spree-killer competitive ethos. For investors, that meant they priced firms not based on expected returns per se but on the odds that they would become ones rather than zeros. Venture capitalists always played that way, with a few big winners picking up the slack (and then some) for a bunch of losers.

How the World Works
by Noam Chomsky , Arthur Naiman and David Barsamian
Published 13 Sep 2011

When you read their literature, it’s all full of the danger of the masses and their rising power and how we have to defeat them. It’s kind of vulgar, inverted Marxism. The other group is the high planning sectors of the government. They talk the same way—how we have to worry about the rising aspirations of the common man and the impoverished masses who are seeking to improve standards and harming the business climate. So they can be class-conscious. They have a job to do. But it’s extremely important to make other people, the rest of the population, believe that there is no such thing as class. We’re all just equal, we’re all Americans, we live in harmony, we all work together, everything is great. Take, for example, the book Mandate for Change, put out by the Progressive Policy Institute, the Clinton think tank.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

The real illusion is the idea that there is anyone that claims that aid—by itself—can eliminate global poverty or that the total elimination of global poverty is the appropriate standard against which the effectiveness of aid should be judged. There is no silver bullet for development and no single approach that can solve global poverty—not trade, foreign investment, a better business climate, improved health, better education, democracy, better governance, or lower population growth. The test of whether aid can solve poverty all by itself is an impossible standard. Although some aid proponents make strong statements about its potential benefits (especially charities trying to raise money), no one in donor organizations or in the academic community claims that aid—by itself—can eliminate global poverty.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

This does not mean the state is powerless, but rather that its power is more contingent on that of finance capital and the bondholders. State powers and practices have been more and more directed to satisfying the demands of corporations and bondholders, often at the expense of citizens. This entails strong state support for the creation of a good business climate favourable to capital. The result in many instances is that states can be doing very well while their populations fare poorly. This even applies, somewhat surprisingly, to countries like Germany, where wage repression contains working-class consumption at the same time as German-based capital and the country’s financial state look to be in very good shape.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

Drug money of course didn't stop flowing in the 1990's, and it doesn't take a genius to see how to get around the AML controls. Say a street dealer sell drugs -- sugar-coated croissants, perhaps -- in Paris for EUR 1 million in undeclared cash. He drives with this dirty cash in a bag to Vienna, then hops across the border to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, famous for its investor-friendly business climate. There he starts a new small high-cash business on paper, say a fashion shop or nightclub. He rings up lots of transactions and creates EUR 1.00 million in new profit. He pays taxes on that, at the flat rate of 19%, after a deductible of EUR 500,000 investment bonus (which cost him only EUR 2,500 in a large envelope).

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 11 Apr 2011

Rahn’s seed corn contention contains a kernel of truth: Capital certainly can and does promote investment and economic growth. Helping it flow efficiently, at first glance, seems like a good idea. But here is where the arguments fall apart. First, financial capital isn’t the only kind of capital. Social capital—an educated and experienced workforce, a trustworthy business climate, and so on—matters more. Having seed corn is just one factor in achieving a good harvest, along with rain, good soils, fertilizer, and the human capital, knowledge, and confidence to put it all together. “Access to capital is not, in fact, the decisive constraint on economic growth,” wrote the economist Martin Wolf.

Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market
by B. Mark Smith
Published 1 Jan 2001

Now Smith wanted Merrill back, to provide Pierce & Company with a desperately needed infusion of new capital and management talent. Merrill was not certain he wanted to take on the responsibility; after all, he had plenty of money and had just been married for the third time, to a woman who expected him to lead a life of leisurely semiretirement. It was not an easy decision. Merrill was fully aware that the business climate was grim. His firm quietly commissioned a poll to measure the true depth of the public’s antipathy toward Wall Street. The survey found that the public greatly distrusted brokers, believing that they deliberately tried to lure investors into speculative stocks because commissions were higher on those shares.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

In chapter 9, “Eliminate Global Poverty,” Michael Strong cowrites a subsection called “Women’s Empowerment Zones,” with Mark Frazier of OpenWorld, which helps free zones become self-funding. They eliminate rhetoric from their argument and allow the mind-expanding facts to speak for themselves. Throughout the developing world, after a piece of land has been designated as a free zone with Singapore- or Hong Kong-class business climate improvements, the value of the land climbs by 500% to 3,000% or more . . . In the San Isidro free zone in the Dominican Republic, land values rose 2,000% after the land was freed of taxes, customs duties, and telecommunications monopolies. In Dubai and Freeport Bahamas, property value increases have been on the order of 8,000% over the initial 12-year period following introduction of free zone incentives. . . .

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
by Philip A. Fisher
Published 13 Apr 2015

Yet the forecasting record of seers predicting changes in the business cycle has generally been abysmal. They can seriously misjudge if and when recessions may occur, and are worse in predicting their severity and duration. Furthermore, neither the stock market as a whole nor the course of any particular stock tends to move in close parallel with the business climate. Changes in mass psychology and in how the financial community as a whole decided to appraise the outlook either for business in general or for a particular stock can have overriding importance and can vary almost unpredictably. For these reasons, I believe that it is hard to be correct in forecasting the short-term movement of stocks more than 60 percent of the time no matter how diligently the skill is cultivated.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

“Europe—and London in particular—is already ahead of the U.S. and New York in OTC [over the counter—which is to say difficult for regulators to monitor] derivatives, which drive broader trading flows and help foster the kind of continuous innovation that contributes heavily to financial services leadership,” the McKinsey report cautioned. “‘The U.S. is running the risk of being marginalized’ in derivatives, to quote one business leader, because of its business climate, not its location. The more amenable and collaborative regulatory environment in London in particular makes businesses more comfortable about creating new derivative products and structures there than in the U.S.” Moreover, the report sounded an alarm about the future. America’s overly zealous regulators were on the verge of another colossal mistake: they were planning to raise capital requirements for U.S. banks, a measure McKinsey warned was unnecessary and would weaken the country’s financial champions in the fierce global competition for business.

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization
by Iain Gately
Published 27 Oct 2001

Major Lewis Ginter, patrician manager of Allen and Ginter, took the battle to Duke by offering to buy his company. But Duke, corporate rottweiler par excellence, was better placed to triumph in the ensuing dog-fight. He had the lowest production costs, the least principled sales team, and his morality was considered shocking, even in a business climate that valued cunning above integrity. In April 1889, Duke threatened to raise his advertising expenditure even further, which forced the hands of the other major producers. They met in New York in the same month and agreed to form the ‘American Tobacco Company’, a trust dedicated to becoming the sole supplier of tobacco products in the United States of America.

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry
by William K. Black
Published 31 Mar 2005

Control frauds are human; they enjoy the psychological rewards of running one of the most “profitable” firms. The press, local business elites, politicians, employees, and the charities that receive (typically large) contributions from the company invariably label the CEO a genius. In fact, they are pathetic businessmen. If they had been able to run a profitable, honest company in a tough business climate, they would have done so. Control frauds who take money from the company through normal mechanisms (with the blessing of auditors) and receive the adulation of elite opinion makers are extremely difficult to prosecute. The control frauds we convicted became too greedy and began to take funds through “straw” borrowers.3 A prosecutor who detects the straw can win a conviction.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
by Jason Stearns
Published 29 Mar 2011

Several banks were set up to manage the cash flows to and from these various projects, and shares in the front companies were reserved for parliamentarians and ministers in both governments.18 The management of Mugabe’s corporation OSLEG included the commander of the Zimbabwean Defense Forces, General Vitalis Zvinavashe, as well as the minister of defense, along with top officials in the state mining company and minerals marketing board.19 This kind of business climate favored enterprising, rough-mannered, and unscrupulous businessmen. Billy Rautenbach fit this mold. A former race car driver and the son of a wealthy Zimbabwean trucking magnate, Rautenbach took over the family business when his older brother died in an accident, and he set up lucrative car dealerships throughout southern Africa.

Stacy Mitchell
by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

The building I’m in now was rundown and all the others nearby were boarded up,” she said. “It was dangerous too.” Today the buildings have been restored, half a dozen new businesses have opened since 2003, and long-standing stores, like the onehundred-year-old Clarke Hardware, are reporting a much improved business climate.1 The changes seem to have occurred virtually overnight. But they are in fact the culmination of many small improvements that began in 1998 with the formation of Culpeper Renaissance, a community organization dedicated to resurrecting the downtown. One of their first initiatives, said Diane Logan, executive director of the group, was organizing a neighborhood watch to clean up the drug dealing and vandalism that had taken over certain blocks.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 7 May 2018

The social and legislative changes that were sweeping the country in the late eighteenth century were having the undesirable effect of dividing society quite brutally: while the landed aristocracy had for centuries protected itself in grand houses behind walls and parks and ha-has, and with resident staff to keep mischief at bay, the enriched beneficiaries of the new business climate were much more accessible to the persistent poor. They and their possessions were generally both visible and, especially in the fast-growing cities, nearby; they tended to live in houses and on streets within earshot and slingshot of the vast armies of the impoverished. Envy was abroad. Robbery was frequent.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus) is a jack-of-all-trades (including theater director, lecturer, and consultant) who happens to have a lot of clever ideas about the new media. Thriving on Anxiety The management theory industry is clearly a formidable business, broad enough to draw on the brainpower of everybody from professors to CEOs and flexible enough to respond to sudden changes in the business climate. But that does not entirely explain why it is so successful. Why are so many people so eager to throw themselves under its wheels? Why do so many business people who are already working themselves into an early grave pick up yet another book on organizational transformation? And why do so many companies that have sworn never to have any more truck with consultancies decide to give them just one more go?

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age
by James Crabtree
Published 2 Jul 2018

“A lot of economic activity came to a standstill,” he said. “The demand-supply gap vanished. All of us as entrepreneurs, we took pains to set up all of these projects, looking at this growth potential, which never happened.” Suddenly, the same tycoons who for years seemed uniquely equipped to prosper within India’s complex business climate found that even they were undone by it. Problems affected industrialists all across India, although the once-mighty infrastructure giants of Andhra Pradesh were especially badly hit. And few represented their plight more clearly than Rajagopal himself, the man who won infamy with a can of pepper spray, as he spent his days trundling around New Delhi, trying to fix investment projects that had gone sour and figure out how to repay the giant sums that his struggling company now owed.

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
Published 25 Feb 2021

And that means they can’t buy just any cocoa beans or cobalt. They must know exactly where the raw materials have come from. The result is a more fragmented market, in which the commodity traders are less able to buy from anywhere and sell to anyone. A third challenge for the traders strikes at the core of their business: climate change. Much of the industry’s profits come from trading fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal. If Big Oil and Big Coal are responsible for polluting the planet, the traders are their enablers, shipping their production to global markets. As the world increasingly turns against oil and coal consumption, the traders’ business will suffer.

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
by Mark Pendergrast
Published 2 Jan 2000

By e-mail I receive “Coffee Talk’s Daily Dose of News,” which ends with a section called “News from Origin.” The news is mostly awful in the poverty-stricken coffee-growing countries. Here is a random sampling of headlines from August 19-20, 2009, but every day brings such news:Latin Leftists Fear a Honduras Coup Domino Effect Colombia Arrests Ex-security Head Ethiopia’s Business Climate Worsening, Chamber of Commerce Says Mexico: Gunmen Attack Newspaper Offices UN Official: Zimbabwe’s Woes “Pose Significant Challenge” Kenya Drought Worsens Hunger Risk Yemen Rebels Kidnap 15 Red Crescent Aid Workers Indonesia Militants Plotted Obama Attack Group Finds More Unmarked Graves in Indian Kashmir Quake Hits Sumatra, Indonesia Ana Remnants May Regain Strength in Gulf of Mexico Coffee-growing regions seem plagued with more than their fair share of natural disasters.

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan
by Seth G. Jones
Published 12 Apr 2009

Lieutenant General David Barno argued that a critical pillar in counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan was “good governance,” which included the provision of essential services to the population.1 International organizations such as the World Bank were equally keen to support governance. One World Bank assessment emphasized “investments in physical infrastructure (especially roads, water systems, and electricity), agriculture, securing land and property arrangements, creating a healthy business climate with access to skills and capital, good governance, health, and education.”2 The problem was not that Afghan and international leaders failed to understand the importance of governance and its impact on the insurgency. Virtually everyone paid lip service to governance. Rather, it was prioritizing governance over other efforts and translating this into reality.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
by Jon Gertner
Published 15 Mar 2012

In the months after the stock market crash of 1929, when the black depths of the Great Depression weren’t yet apparent, Kelly and a few other colleagues belonged to a buoyant “three-hours-for-lunch” club, a group of Labs employees intent on trying the newest Manhattan speakeasies (Prohibition was still in force) before the police could shut them down. But the business climate grew ever more dire. The astonishing drop in manufacturing jobs and the unrelenting misery in the American farm belt drove down phone subscriptions—and with them AT&T’s revenue. In the course of three years, between 1930 and 1933, more than 2.5 million households, most of them Bell subscribers, disconnected from the phone grid.

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street
by John Brooks
Published 6 Jul 2014

Then the tape returned to Plumley, who was now warming to his task and blaming the stock-market plunge on “the coincidental impact of two confidence-upsetting factors—a dimming of profit expectations and President Kennedy’s quashing of the steel price increase.” Then came a longer interruption, chock-full of reassuring facts and figures. At its conclusion, Plumley was back on the tape, hammering away at his theme, which had now taken on overtones of “I told you so.” “We have had an awesome demonstration that the ‘right business climate’ cannot be brushed off as a Madison Avenue cliché but is a reality much to be desired,” the broad tape quoted him as saying. So it went through the early afternoon; it must have been a heady time for the Dow-Jones subscribers, who could alternately nibble at the caviar of higher stock prices and sip the champagne of Plumley’s jabs at the Kennedy administration.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism
by William Baker and Addison Wiggin
Published 2 Nov 2009

At wartime in 1944, only half of the prices in the United States were marketbased; a study by Hugh Rockoff, Milton Friedman, and Anna Schwartz tried to estimate economic activity based upon an estimation of actual 92 ENDLESS MONEY prices, which showed that real consumer outlays fell from 1931 to 1943 (in contrast to official government statistics as depicted in Figure 4.5), and they did not return to the 1941 level until 1946.15 16 Higgs states that the economy wallowed in the late 1930s up through the war and was plagued by very low levels of private investment, this being caused by the reservations concerning government intervention. A Fortune magazine survey of November 1941 asked about 1,000 businessmen to predict the political and business climate after the war, and the result characterizes the depth of this suspicion. Just 7 percent thought a system of free enterprise would emerge; the majority (52%) predicted there would be a system under which government would take over much but leave many opportunities to the private sector. However, 37 percent believed there would be a semi-socialized society with little room for the private economy, and 4 percent felt a fascist regime would emerge.17 If one can’t go so far to accuse the Roosevelt administration of advancing the cause of socialism, at the very least Private Debt Government Debt GDP 600 500 ($ Billions) 400 300 200 100 Figure 4.5 Economic Output and Private & Government Debt (1916–1960) Source: Historical Statistics of the United States. 1960 1950 1940 1930 1920 1916 0 Flat-Earth Economics 93 the government, being friendly to labor, had encouraged wages to rise 10 percent from 1929 to 1937 while prices of finished goods were 8 percent lower, a dyspeptic recipe for business.18 It is little wonder why businessmen remained discouraged in 1940.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

The problems began, however, when companies went beyond looking for the good stuff that benefits everyone in a locality, such as strong infrastructure or a healthy and educated workforce, and into searching for wealth-extracting free rides such as special tax treatment, exemptions from pro-union laws, lax environmental standards or outright financial inducements from local taxpayers. By the time Oates popularised Tiebout’s paper in the late 1960s, the relocation industry was already maturing, with secretive consultants playing local areas off against each other and constantly pushing states to get the ‘business climate’ right – which meant extracting maximum subsidies from local taxpayers. In the words of Greg LeRoy of the US nonprofit group Good Jobs First, a veteran observer of these change, these consultants are now: the rock stars in expensive suits at economic development conferences: the speaker-bait that brings in hundreds of public officials who hang on their every word.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Indeed, Jackson was such a foe of paper money (and, famously, of the Second Bank of the United States) that he required all purchases of government land to be paid for in specie. Trump’s populism knows no such discipline. Since Trump’s election, the economy has begun to recover from a near decade of stagnation. The stock market reached new heights, rising sharply straight after his election, with investors anticipating a more pro-business climate. Unemployment continued to decline. Blue-collar wage growth outstripped the rest of the economy. The wealth effect kicked in: the continued rise in house prices coupled with the sharp rise in stock prices and business asset prices added significant support to GDP. Trump addressed some of business’s most pressing concerns.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

In addition to identifying Bellevue as an immediate alternative for headcount growth, some Amazon executives concluded that HQ2 would now have to be bigger than previously planned and most likely ramp up faster than initially expected. By the time the seventeen-page August document was written, the HQ2 and S-teams were homing in on New York City and Crystal City in Northern Virginia—regions they believed could accommodate the coming expansion. “If costs and business climate are primary factors, we recommend Northern Virginia as the top site. If existing talent is primary driver, we recommend New York City,” the paper read. The HQ2 team predicted that both cities would be politically welcoming—even if Amazon selected Long Island City in Queens, just outside the Manhattan business core, a once gritty industrial community that over the last fifteen years had gentrified at disorienting speed.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Jan 1995

Both the WordPerfect Corporation (now owned by Novell) and Novell itself, the nation’s leading networking software company, were started and initially staffed by Mormons.25 The story is told of Novell’s CEO, Ray Noorda—one of the richest men in the United States—that a potential business partner once went to meet a Novell executive in a dingy hotel in Austin, Texas, and could not find the executive’s name in the register. He examined the list of guests registered and found the name Noorda listed; Noorda was sharing a room because he did not want to pay for two rooms.26 Despite a difficult business climate in the 1980s due to turndowns in mining and steel, Utah has emerged as a center of high-tech development in large measure because of Mormon entrepreneurship.27 Just as in the case of the Japanese, the Germans, and all other communities that have sharply defined insides and outsides, the downside of this extremely strong Mormon sense of community is hostility to outsiders.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

Conscious of its pariah status, SLORC changed its name to the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) and launched a worldwide PR offensive. To attract legitimate sources of foreign currency, the regime promoted Burma as a haven for tourists and aggressively pursued foreign investment from companies that are not bound by national sanctions or local purchasing laws. Most of these efforts were in vain. The business climate is still widely perceived as opaque, corrupt, and highly inefficient. The foreign investors coveted by Burma’s rulers stayed away from nearly every sector except for natural gas and power generation. The country still suffers from pervasive government controls, inefficient economic policies, and stifling rural poverty.

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
by Neil Irwin
Published 4 Apr 2013

On the sunny Mediterranean coast of Spain, retirees from Britain and Germany were buying up houses so fiercely that prices rose 145 percent from 1997 to 2005. In Britain, a nation in the midst of the best fifteen years of economic growth in a century, home prices increased 154 percent during the same period. In Ireland, thanks to a favorable business climate and rapid job creation, prices rose 192 percent. Across the planet, people were rapidly concluding that four walls and a roof were more valuable relative to earnings than they had ever been before. The Economist tallied the value of all housing in the developed world as having risen to $70 trillion in 2005, from $30 trillion just five years earlier.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

JP Morgan Research, November 2012. Summers, Lawrence. “Second-Term Presidents Cost America 40 Lost Years” Financial Times, August 10, 2014. ——. “Bold Reform Is the Only Answer to Secular Stagnation.” Financial Times, September 7, 2014. “Technocrats—Minds Like Machines.” Economist, November 19, 2011. “Turkey: Business Climate Will Gradually Erode with Erdogan Presidency.” Eurasia Group, July 2014. “Turkey’s Delight: A Growing Economy.” Bloomberg News, August 31, 2003. “Turkish PM’s Top Aide Says Erdoan One of Only Two World Leaders.” Today’s Zaman, August 29, 2013. Wang, Zhengxu. “China’s Leadership Succession: New Faces and New Rules of the Game.”

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018

One spam king, Peter Yuryevich Levashov, also known as Peter Severa, or Peter of the North, rented his botnet out for between $200 and $500 per million pieces of spam, and then also took a cut of the referral traffic his spam emails generated; such schemes netted him upward of $600,000 over a three-year period, according to records that leaked online.103* The scourge of Eastern European cybercrime presented us with interesting lessons about criminality and the elasticity of these online crime markets; many of the carders and hackers working in places like Russia were talented engineers who had little legitimate opportunity to use their skills. The former Soviet Union countries had excelled in technical education, but the collapse of most of their economies in the 1990s and the lack of mature business climates meant there were far more computer scientists than there were high-tech jobs. Many hackers were actively seeking legitimate, well-paying opportunities for work. More than one Russian hacker was uncovered by investigators through undercover operations that had them apply for legit jobs; agents or informants inside these criminal forums simply told a target that they had a lead on a possible job, and the hacker happily sent over a resumé listing his actual name and professional background.104* Hacking efforts often amounted to an old-fashioned shakedown: a criminal accessed a company’s network, then demanded a “security consulting fee” to tell the company how he got inside and to keep it quiet.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

My former Brookings colleague Tesia Mamassian works as the vice president of operations of the Detroit Regional Partnership (DRP) in Michigan, a regional economic development nonprofit serving the eleven counties around the city of Detroit and their 5.4 million residents. The DRP covers a diverse collection of communities and industrial and technology centers spread over a large area. It coordinates with Michigan’s state and local governments to attract new business and investment to the region and produces reports on improving the business climate, as well as informing programs on workforce development. The DRP helps big companies in the Detroit region, such as the Ford Motor Company and General Motors, connect with smaller firms in the new automotive and “mobility technology” sector (self-driving cars and electric vehicles) to create a business network focused on developing technology clusters.

The Billion-Dollar Molecule
by Barry Werth

During the past several hours he had personally edited the scientists’ Pittsburgh abstracts, chosen the fonts for them, photocopied them, tinkered with a balky copier, supervised their mailing—“micromanaged,” as Murcko unreassuredly put it, the company’s coming foray into gladitorial science. Now he was racing to get home to see Amy and the boys before leaving at five the next morning for ten days in Japan. It had not, in the end, been a hard decision to make AIDS Vertex’s second project. The scientists had. produced encouraging data, the business climate had improved, cathepsin E faded; time had run out. But the choice had required from Boger a 180-degree conversion—an uncommon occurrence. For two years he had sworn, correctly, that Vertex had no place in HIV research. Now he was embarking with equal commitment to sell an AIDS program in Japan, his third “death march” there in twelve months.

When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures
by Richard D. Lewis
Published 1 Jan 1996

To sum up, Finnish leadership practices are sound. Finnish managers, like Finnish army officers, usually lead from the front and they generally strike the right balance between authoritarianism and consultative style. Although the ice breaks slowly, foreign managers in Finland will find that the informal business climate gives them freedom of action. They will not be encumbered by too many manuals, systems or hierarchical paths. Finns leave work early, but they start early and can have achieved a fine day’s work by the time most Britons are heading for lunch. Finnish employees are honest, reliable, punctual and generally loyal, and their sisu qualities are well documented.

The Making of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 16 May 2007

Modern Britain became a country with a strong financial and City tradition, always trying to break down trading barriers and shaped by outside connections, not least with the United States. That Britain was the one that tariff reform would have killed at birth. And in the end Asquith was proved right. Chamberlain was pulverized. It was partly that the business climate improved, so that the spectre of unemployment and mass bankruptcies that had helped him in the early days faded away by 1905. But it was also that he simply lost the argument. When the election was finally called in 1906 it produced a huge Liberal landslide. Even Balfour, the prime minister, lost his seat, though another was soon found for him.

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
by Giovanni Arrighi
Published 15 Mar 2010

Far from regretting the astounding total (663,755 gold florins), he concluded: “I think it casts a brilliant light on our estate and it seems to me that the monies were well spent and I am very pleased with this.” (Martines 1988:243) This observation shows that Lorenzo de’ Medici had a far better sense of the business climate in which the Medici operated than the later historians and social scientists who mistook the Medici’s indulgence in THE RISE OF CAPITAL 107 pomp and display as the main reason why capital invested in their firm lagged far behind profits. In fact, the Medici profits were high precisely because — to paraphrase Hicks’s dictum quoted earlier — they were not reinvested in the further expansion of the business that generated them.

Statistics in a Nutshell
by Sarah Boslaugh
Published 10 Nov 2012

Problem Suppose you were considering whether to open a stationer’s shop in a small or a large city. Greater potential profit is to be made in the large city but also greater potential loss (due to the greater expenses of setting up business there). The success of the shop will largely depend on the local business climate when you open. If other businesses in the city are expanding, you have a good chance to land some large orders, but if they are struggling, you might barely make enough sales to meet your expenses. Figure 14-35 contains data of payoffs under two states of nature. Calculate the minimax, maximax, and maximin decisions for this situation.

The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885
by Pierre Berton
Published 1 Jan 1971

Stephen set off immediately for London to attempt the impossible: to find buyers for the new issue in a market which, as Macdonald’s confidant, the British financier Sir John Rose, wired, was “practically shut against Canada Pacific.” Stephen succeeded. He convinced financial houses in London, Amsterdam, and Paris that they should purchase blocks of the stock from the Americans (CPR shares were listed on the New York exchange but not in London). It was a considerable piece of financial legerdemain, given the business climate, “almost entirely due,” Rose told the Prime Minister, “to the untiring efforts of our friend Stephen, whose zeal, energy, confidence in himself and the enterprise seemed to inspire everybody else with like confidence.” The first instalment of ten million shares was paid on February 1, 1883, netting the company five millions in cash – a payment that arrived almost at the eleventh hour.

City: Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas W. Rae
Published 15 Jan 2003

Altogether, about 225 arrests occurred, as city, state, and National Guard forces overwhelmed the streets. Armored personnel carriers rolled down streets, giving the impression of military occupation. Three hundred Hill residents, black and white, fled to a suburban Congregational church for shelter from the firestorm. New Haven’s riot did irreparable harm to the business climate in the affected neighborhoods. A central reason for the Lee revolution in city government had of course been the commercial decline of the central city, both in the CBD and in the neighborhoods. Competition from suburban retailing was rising sharply, bank credit for business investment in increasingly black neighborhoods was scarce, and then the much-publicized trashing of existing stores seemed one problem too many.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
by Jeremy Scahill
Published 1 Jan 2007

The group recommended that President Bush “direct the Secretaries of Commerce, State, and Energy to continue working with relevant companies and countries to establish the commercial conditions that will allow oil companies operating in Kazakhstan the option of exporting their oil via the BTC pipeline” instead of through the Russian controlled pipeline. It called for the Administration to “deepen [its] commercial dialogue with Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and other Caspian states to provide a strong, transparent, and stable business climate for energy and related infrastructure projects.”49 The BTC pipeline was inaugurated in May 2005, and President Bush dispatched his new Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to represent him at the ceremony. “BTC opens a new era in the Caspian Basin’s development. It ensures Caspian oil will reach European and other markets in a commercially viable and environmentally sound way,” Bush said in a letter read by Bodman at the ceremony.50 The letter was addressed to the dictator of Azerbaijan, whom Bush praised.

The Chomsky Reader
by Noam Chomsky
Published 11 Sep 1987

That gives you a plausible theory. U.S. foreign policy is in fact based on the principle that human rights are irrelevant, but that improving the climate for foreign business operations is highly relevant. In fact, that flows from the central geopolitical conception. Now how do you improve the business climate in a Third World country? Well, it’s easy. You murder priests, you torture peasant organizers, you destroy popular organizations, you institute mass murder and repression to prevent any popular organization. And that improves the investment climate. So there’s a secondary correlation between American aid and the deterioration of human rights.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

Joan Didion, “Life at Court,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 1989, reprinted in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 132–39. 22. Bennett Harrison, “Regional Restructuring and ‘Good Business Climates’: The Economic Transformation of New England Since World War II,” in Sunbelt/Snowbelt: Urban Development and Regional Restructuring, eds., Larry Sawers and William K. Tabb (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford, 1984), 49; David Lampe, ed., The Massachusetts Miracle: High Technology and Regional Revitalization (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988), 4. 23.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco
by Chester W. Hartman and Sarah Carnochan
Published 15 Feb 2002

.; $4,000 from the Campeau Corporation of California; $3,000 each from Am Fac and the First Interstate Bank of California; $2,500 from Citicorp; and others as well.38 Based on analysis of the first $345,000 of the $600,000 Feinstein raised, 63 percent was accounted for by forty-eight contributions exceeding $1,000. (“The companies want stability in government. They want to make sure that there isn’t a bad business climate in the city,” said a Feinstein spokesperson.)39 “No contributions on that scale have ever been made public in a campaign for a S.F. city office,” observed the March 18, 1983, Chronicle. “Downtown officials seem genuinely angered and embarrassed for the city’s image by the recall. But some also have confided privately that it makes sense to put money on the mayor during the recall that she is expected to win, rather than playing favorites among competing candidates in a regular mayoral election,” the story went on to explain.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

This eBook is licensed to Karim Mamdani, karim.mamdani@gmail.com on 12/02/2019 3 Edward Johnstone and the Aristocracy of Finance Karl Marx read the Economist, starting at least as early as the summer of 1850, when he acquired a pass to the reading room of the British Museum.1 The revolutionary surge of two years earlier, the ‘springtime of the peoples’, had fizzled, and to the author of the Communist Manifesto the back issues of the fiercely free trade Economist suggested why: after two years in which poor harvests and high grain prices, a downturn in trade and a credit crisis had fuelled popular and middle class discontent, the business climate began to improve in mid-1848, strengthening conservatism and dampening protests against it all over Europe. Yet Marx took more than raw economic data from the Economist. In it he identified a sector of liberal opinion with a distinct worldview and cosmopolitan wealth, so fearful of further popular upheaval that by 1851 it was ready to welcome an illiberal but orderly dictatorship in the revolutionary capital of the nineteenth century, France.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Aug 2020

Meanwhile Florida’s electoral votes doubled, Arizona’s went up by half, and California replaced New York as the nation’s most populous state. Reasons included the spread of air-conditioning, the Sun Belt’s salubrious “business climate”—a term coined by General Electric executives in the 1950s to describe municipalities with low wages and weak unions—and the ballooning military-industrial complex, which appreciated a salubrious business climate, too: between 1950 and 1956, New York lost more than a third of its share of prime Defense Department contracts to the Sun Belt. Sun Belters were prickly about the Northeasterners who behaved as if the world still revolved around them—Texans most of all.

The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise
by Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher
Published 1 Dec 2009

Even if you left your old job for a terrific new position and brought all your old buddies with you, you won’t be able to 125 126 C HAPTER 7 U NDERSTANDING W HY P ROCESSES A RE C RITICAL TO S CALE transport your previous company’s culture. You are all somewhat older now, have had new experiences in and out of work, have new business peers, and a new office environment. Regardless of whether you left your old job, even that organization is forever in flux. People quit, new people get hired, the business climate changes, people get promoted, and so on. The same organization two years ago compared to today is different. There is no stopping the change that is forever taking place. If all organizations are different and all organizations are in a constant state of change, what does this mean for an organization’s processes?

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
by Steve Coll
Published 29 Mar 2009

He even hired, as his driver in Saudi Arabia, a son of the driver who had been waiting for Mohamed at the desert airstrip where his plane crashed and burned. Bakr reared his children as his father had done, with an emphasis on discipline and self-reliance—he would not let his children fly on private jets and insisted that they take care of their own travel documents, tickets, and baggage. And as Mohamed had been, Bakr was at ease in a business climate of ethnic and religious plurality. He worked in close partnership with Middle Eastern Christians, such as the Sarkissian family, with whom he formed a joint venture for major construction projects in Saudi Arabia. He also relied upon Fuad Rihani, an American citizen of Jordanian origin, a Protestant actively involved with Jordanian churches, who served as an important Bin Laden adviser after Bakr took charge.1 Bakr remained something of a workaholic.

Cuba Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Any lack of historical credentials is compensated for by inviting amenities: namely, the fine restaurant, appealing pool, attractive public areas, large bright rooms, in-house cabaret show and beautiful bayside setting. Eating Top of Chapter 5 Central Cienfuegos Florida Blanca 18 CUBAN $ (Av 38 No 3720 , btwn Calles 37 39; mains from CUC$5; 11:30am-11pm Wed-Mon) Brave new paladar testing the water in the new business climate. There’s an inviting interior and excellent prawns. Teatro Café Tomás CAFE $ OFFLINE MAP GOOGLE MAP (Av 56 No 2703, btwn Calles 27 29; 10am-10pm) Cafe, souvenir stall and nightly music venue, this small space wedged between the Teatro Tomás Terry and the neoclassical Colegio San Lorenzo is the most atmospheric place to flop down and observe the morning exercisers in Parque Martí.

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield
by Jeremy Scahill
Published 22 Apr 2013

With Blackwater under intense investigation and his top deputies indicted on federal conspiracy and weapons charges, Prince left the United States in 2010 and relocated to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, a major hub for the mercenary industry and the war-contracting business as a whole. Prince had close ties to the royals, particularly the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. He said he chose Abu Dhabi because of its “great proximity to potential opportunities across the entire Middle East, and great logistics,” adding that it has “a friendly business climate, low to no taxes, free trade and no out of control trial lawyers or labor unions. It’s pro-business and opportunity.” From his adopted home in the UAE, Prince continued his mercenary activities. He left the United States, he said, to “make it harder for the jackals to get my money,” adding that he wanted to explore new opportunities in “the energy field.”

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 May 2011

Third, energy security is also a system—composed of the national policies and international institutions that are designed to respond in a coordinated way to disruptions, dislocations, and emergencies, as well as helping to maintain the steady flow of supplies. And, finally and crucially, if longer-term in nature, is investment. Energy security requires policies and a business climate that promote investment and development to ensure that adequate supplies and infrastructure will be available, in a timely way, in the future. Oil-importing countries think in terms of security of supply. Energy-exporting countries turn the question around. They talk of “security of demand” for their oil and gas exports, on which they depend to generate economic growth and a very large share of government revenues—and to maintain social stability.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Mar 2009

A Minneapolis Tribune poll found that of the 80 percent of those surveyed who had heard of the Baker case, only 4 percent said it made a difference in the way they viewed the President. He couldn’t lose. A private utility executive would take to the White House lobby to announce a $1 billion expansion in Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, proclaiming that the “favorable business climate” caused by the tax cut was responsible for his decision. They were supposed to be enemies: Johnson was a foremost advocate of public power plants; Goldwater was the spokesman for private ones. But this President didn’t seem to have any enemies. On March 23 the Wall Street Journal ran an expose estimating Johnson’s fortune at $20 million.

Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies
by Tim Koller , McKinsey , Company Inc. , Marc Goedhart , David Wessels , Barbara Schwimmer and Franziska Manoury
Published 16 Aug 2015

For this case study, we use a five-year detailed forecast, followed by a summary forecast for 10 years. The continuing value follows after the 15-year explicit forecast period (discussed in Chapter 12). Creating Scenarios For valuing Heineken, we develop three scenarios that can describe the company’s potential strategy and business climate: 534 CASE STUDY: HEINEKEN 1. Business as usual: Under the business-as-usual scenario, the industry experiences no major shocks, Heineken continues to grow organically at a modest rate, and its margins and capital efficiency remain constant at 2013 levels. 2. Business improvement: In this scenario, Heineken rigorously improves its operations and increases its margins by as much as six percentage points in 2018, thereby closing half of the performance gap with SABMiller, its nearest competitor in size. 3.

Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
Published 15 Nov 2007

“I could not realize for a time that I was to miss upon my return one of my oldest, best, and dearest friends—one who had been a friend in boyhood to me, when the aid of such a man counted for so much. Why did I not appreciate him sufficiently while he lived? But we never do. The finest characteristics of our friends seem only to shine with the brightest luster when we are denied their presence on earth.”26 THOUGH EDGAR THOMSON had gone on line in a depressed business climate, Carnegie did not let this slow him down. On the contrary, he appeared almost to glory in the adverse conditions. Other entrepreneurs might have reduced output until the market was stronger, but Carnegie pushed Shinn to keep the new plant operating seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice
by Pierre Vernimmen , Pascal Quiry , Maurizio Dallocchio , Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi
Published 16 Oct 2017

Source: INSEE, Factset When inflation is accompanied by low real interest rates, companies are tempted to overinvest and pay for it by borrowing, thereby unbalancing their capital structure. Disinflation leads to exactly the opposite behaviour: high real interest rates encourage companies to get rid of debt, all the more so given that high rates are usually accompanied by anaemic economic activity and a business climate not conducive to borrowing. 4. What is equity for? Equity capital thus plays two roles. Its first function is, of course, to finance part of the investment in the business. Another purpose, just as important, though, is to serve as a guarantee to the company’s creditors who finance the other part of the investment.

Stigum's Money Market, 4E
by Marcia Stigum and Anthony Crescenzi
Published 9 Feb 2007

Nevertheless, it’s intriguing to see that commercial paper issuance began to fall before the 2001 recession. FIGURE 22.7 Volume of nonfinancial commercial paper outstanding (in millions of dollars) FIGURE 22.8 Normalized commercial paper volume around the start of recessions The decline could well reflect the fact that businesses have become more responsive to changes in the business climate, adjusting their production schedules virtually in real time when they occur. Nevertheless, Shen (2003) argues that a variety of supply and demand factors combined to produce the unusual event. For example, the supply of funding was probably reduced because of the extraordinary preference for only very high-quality commercial paper that has virtually no chance of defaulting.

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

In due course many of the larger European multinationals—Royal Dutch Shell, BP, EMI, Unilever—were well able to repay the compliment. Contemporary economic theory and practice is very much the product of Euro-American interaction. The Keynesian revolution in macroeconomics had already established that government intervention had a vital role to play in nourishing the business climate, maintaining full employment, and managing recurrent crises through adjustments of money supply, interest rates, currency, and taxation. In due course the monetarist reaction against Keynes set in under the inspiration of Milton Friedman. Western Europe participated from the start in the international monetary system created in July 1944 under Anglo-American auspices at the Bretton Woods conference, where Keynes had led the British delegation.