Paul Sommers

Monitoring the Community Impacts of the Northwest Forest Plan: An Alternativeto Social Indicators

Use of existing data sources has made the social indicators approach an attractive method for anticipating the social and economic effects of policy changes on resource-dependent communities. Despite its practicality, this approach is severely limited by data availability and reliance on aggregate figures that obscure variation between smaller areas. A forest-dependent community in Washington State was studied in an attempt to discern the effects of the Northwest Forest Plan on local-level social and economic conditions using data from secondary sources supplemented by targeted interviews. Findings from this pilot study strongly suggest that a social indicators approach cannot determine the causal factors behind social and economic change in rural communities. We propose a strategy for repeated surveys of communities and recommend an investment in longitudinal analysis of community businesses, households, and individuals in locales thought likely to be affected by changes in federal land management policies.

Rural Networks in the United States: Lessons from Three Experiments

A number of states and countries have begun to encourage formation of flexible manufacturing networks among small manufacturing and other firms to respond effectively to local economic crises or to enable smaller firms to compete more effectively in the global economy. A variety of strategic approaches have been employed, including funding organizations with a mandate to organize and support networks, and offering challenge grants to groups of firms to interest them in experimenting with a new organizational approach. This article examines several experiments with network stimulation among rural manufacturing firms in Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, including results from surveys and other evaluation studies. No clearly superior strategic approach to network stimulation emerges from this review, but preliminary evaluation results suggest that the most productive approach may involve combining the capacity-building, soft network strategy with efforts to build collaborative manufacturing structures aimed at concrete, bottom-line business results.

Barriers to the adoption of an energy efficient technology

Abstract Solid state electronic ballasts promise significant energy savings in the lighting systems of large buildings. However, organizational factors and standard operating procedures may inhibit the adoption of this technology in the large, bureaucratic public and private sector organizations which represent the major potential users of this technology.

Government Paperwork: Not an Easy Villain after All

Frustration with government-required paperwork is widespread among businessmen. Valuable time seems to be increasingly tied up in keeping records and submitting reports for a plethora of government agencies. Small firms have found paperwork especially onerous due to the limited administrative staff of such firms. The Paperwork Reduction Act (Public Law 96-511), passed in 1980, requires federal agencies to prepare paperwork budgets and to strive to reduce the burden of paperwork on the private sector. The provisions of this act create the impression that paperwork is the regulatory burden, and if one could eliminate procedural paperwork, companies could achieve substantive compliance at far lower cost.

Costs of Compliance in Small and Medium-Sized Businesses1

This paper develops and tests a theory of compliance costs. Tension between not complying, with a low probability of detection, and complying, incurring quite high time and money costs, should result in varied choices for a sample of small businesses but high costs per dollar of revenue for those that comply. Medium-sized businesses are likely to comply because many costs are invariant with respect to size, and because they are likely to be caught if they do not comply. Empirical tests of this theory for a Washington State small- and medium-sized business sample confirm that small businesses report higher mean costs, but have greater variability across firms, than medium-sized businesses.