China is now stuck in an investment-driven growth pattern that has helped it achieve excessive economic growth in the short run but at the cost of environmental quality, ordinary citizens’ welfare, and long-term economic health. Two main factors can be identified as responsible for the formation and continuation of the current growth pattern. One is economic policy, especially fiscal and financial policies, which contribute to the decline in household consumption by depressing household disposable income and reducing social services provided by the government. The other is the law and regulations that the government has used to subsidize investment and production by distorting factor markets, including markets for capital, land, labor, energy, and environment. A systematic legal and institutional reform whose purpose is to liberalize factor markets is therefore required to rebalance China’s economy.

Private governance is currently being evoked as a viable solution to many public policy goals. However, in some circumstances it has shown to produce more harm than good, and even disastrous consequences like in the case of the financial crisis that is raging in most advanced economies. Although the current track record of private regulatory schemes is mixed, policy guidance documents around the world still require that policymakers award priority to self- and co-regulation, with little or no additional guidance being given to policymakers to devise when, and under what circumstances, these solutions can prove viable from a public policy perspective. With an array of examples from several policy fields, this paper approaches regulation as a public-private collaborative form and attempts to identify possible policy tools to be applied by public policymakers to efficiently and effectively approach private governance as a solution, rather than a problem. We propose a six-step theoretical framework and argue that IA techniques should: (i) define an integrated framework including both the possibility that private regulation can be used as an alternative or as a complement to public legislation; (ii) Involve private parties in public IAs in order to define the best strategy or strategies that would ensure achievement of the regulatory objectives; and (iii) Contemplate the deployment of indicators related to governance and activities of the regulators and their ability to coordinate and solve disputes with other regulators.

The discussion about corporate sustainability performance already has a rich and longstanding history.Todate corporate sustainability performance is a key issue in many companies. However, when asked what it means or how to apply this construct in a concrete business context, many entrepreneurs and managers are not able to give an answer. This confusion may be due to the multitude of definitions and descriptions of corporate sustainability performance constructs.To get a better understanding of corporate sustainability performance and to help companies shape their corporate sustainability performance, a plenitude of (reporting) guidelines are available today. However, because of a rich variation in foci, these guidelines also contribute to the corporate sustainability performance confusion among business people.Companies are no longer solely judged on the financial performance, but they also have to account for their sustainability performance to a variety of stakeholders. However, along with the increasing attention of stakeholders for corporate sustainability performance, the number of organizations that assessing companies’ governance, social, ecological and economic performance also increasesThe aim of this paper is to research the validity and compatibility of the screening instruments of two widely respected sustainability rating agencies: the Zurich (Switzerland) based Sustainable Asset Management Group (SAM) and the Boston (USA) based KLD analytics, Inc (KLD). These screening instruments are benchmarked against the Corporate Sustainability Analysis Framework designed and developed by Dommerholt 2009. The results suggest that the SAM and KLD instruments are imperfect measures of corporate sustainability performance, implying that the validity of these measures is questionable. The results also show that the screening instruments are not really compatible indicating that these instruments cannot be used interchangeably because of differences in the underlying conceptions of corporate sustainability performance. Therefore we can say that these screening instruments too seem to add to the confusions surrounding corporate sustainability performance (measurement).

This article argues that efforts to implement CSR and sustainability will need increasingly long-term strategy and action, at a time when both our financial and ecological systems are in growing crisis. The resulting need to wind down dysfunctional economic and business models of the nineteenth and twentieth century is increasingly apparent. New ones now need be created that are fit for the future. This will be a future with powerful new players (e.g. China, India, Brazil) and with more than 9 billion people in a world already in “ecological overshoot. We need to the opportunity to create and shape a new order that will meet the needs of present and future generations.The article introduces the FQ concept, spotlights some key dimensions of high FQ-leadership and begins to sketch out a method to measure the future-readiness of leaders. In this context, the MindTime concept is presented as a potential tool to identify and evolve the relevant styles of thinking. The author identifies some sectors with a particular propensity for long-term thinking and concludes that high-FQ leaders demonstrate a number of specific characteristic, summarized here in what is dubbed the 7Cs approach.