According to widely held beliefs, environmental protection is associated with an increase in costs for businesses imposed by the government. Over the last decade, this view has been challenged by a number of analysts. They have identified many possibilities, from a conceptual or theoretical...

Twenty years ago, Harvard Business School economist and strategy professor Michael Porter stood conventional wisdom about the impact of environmental regulation on business on its head by declaring that well designed regulation could actually enhance competitiveness. The traditional view of...

Jaffe and Palmer (1997) present three distinct variants of the so-called Porter Hypothesis. The weak version of the hypothesis posits that environmental regulation will stimulate certain kinds of environmental innovations. The narrow version of the hypothesis asserts that flexible environmental...

The conventional wisdom about environmental protection is that it comes at an additional cost on firms imposed by the government, which may erode their global competitiveness. However, during the last decade, this paradigm has been challenged by a number of analysts. In particular, Porter...

Because of the time value of money (that is, a dollar today can be invested to yield more than a dollar tomorrow), a project's costs and benefits in different periods are not comparable. Therefore, a discount rate that will convert future sums into present values is used in cost-benefit...

La nécessité d'offrir une couverture universelle pour les soins essentiels est une valeur généralement reconnue. Toutefois, les coûts de santé sont devenus une préoccupation majeure des gouvernements de l'OCDE. Les dépenses en santé augmentent plus rapidement que la richesse dans de...

This paper addresses the question of whether R&D should be carried out by an independent research unit or be produced in-house by the firm marketing the innovation. We define two organizational structures. In an integrated structure, the firm that markets the innovation also carries out and...

L'image du Québec « vert » a récemment fait l'objet de commentaires contradictoires; certains lui donnent une image d'un exemple environnemental à suivre alors que d'autres qualifient cette même image de mythe. Afin de mieux connaître la situation, nous comparons certains indicateurs...

This text presents ten Quebec examples on green profitability. Managers concerned with the quality of the environment may find new ideas and arguments to convince their colleagues in being proactive in this matter. However, before presenting these examples, we must put the issue in a more...