Policy areas

The Department of Commerce has active programs in all of these policy areas. Among other areas, the Federal Government is playing an important role in the funding of research and the transfer of federal technology. 

It has been recognized that security is not entirely a function of military power or geopolitical strength. The security organizations and institutions in other policy areas are increasingly concerned with non-traditional threats to... 

Green papers - they are discussion papers published by the Commission on a specific policy area. They are primarily addressed to interested organisations and individuals who are invited to participate in consultation and debate process. In some cases they provide an impetus for subsequent legislation. 

The European Commission is one of the EU s key institutions and represents and upholds the interests of Europe as a whole (EU 2006b). The Commission acts with complete political independence. It has 25 members, the so-called commissioners - one from each EU country, and each commissioner has responsibility for a particular EU policy area. The Commission must ensure that the legislations adopted by the Council and Parliament are being put into effect. The Commission is also the only institution that has the right to propose new EU legislation. The Commission is assisted by a civil service made up of 36 Directorates-General (DGs) and services. 

In addition to the obvious important scientific contribution that must be made, the successful commercialisation of new technological products depends on essential contributions from other, more eommercial and less scientific disciplines (Figure 12.1). These include patenting proeedures. Patent law therefore has wide implications for research and development (R D), trade and other corporate and government policy areas in general. 

This research was conducted within RAND Infrastructure, Safety, and Environment (ISE), a unit of the RAND Corporation. The mission of ISE is to improve the development, operation, use, and protection of society s essential built and natural assets, and to enhance the related social assets of safety and security of individuals in transit and in their workplaces and communities. The ISE research portfolio encompasses research and analysis on a broad range of policy areas including homeland security, criminal justice, public safety, occupational safety, the environment, energy, natural resources, climate, agriculture, economic development, transportation, information and telecommunications technologies, space exploration, and other aspects of science and technology policy. 

This section gives a nonexhaustive overview of the regulatory state of the art on human risk assessment of chemical mixtures in the United States, the European Union (EU), and other nations and (international agencies. The focus is on regulations for environmental pollution, but when available and relevant, mixture regulations from other policy areas have also been included in the overview, for example, for food quality and the workplace. The reader is referred to McCarty and Borgert (2006) and Monosson (2005) for a more extensive overview of mixture toxicity regulations related to human health. 

The limited EU guidance on risk assessment of chemical mixtures does not mean that the issue is not addressed by the EU member states. However, the level of detail and the status of the guidance vary considerably between the member states and the different policy areas. The UK Food Standards Agency established a special working group to formulate advice on risk assessment of multiple residues of pesticides and veterinary medicines in food, and of multiple sources of exposure to these... 

The most well-known legal principle in the field of chemicals policy is the Precautionary Principle it is so well-known that it hardly requires any further introduction here. It was introduced into EU environmental law through the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. The principle s value as a guide for decision making in different policy areas is often questioned, and some analyses of its impact on EU chemicals policy indicate that its influence is not that significant (Heyvaert, 2006), though it can be hard to determine exactly how influential the principle has been for important law cases from the Court of Justice of the European Communities. 

A voucher scheme can be described in terms of five key policy areas ... 

Environmental policy-making in Europe has undergone a profound change over the last two decades new policies have been initiated primarily at the EU rather than Member State level, and the influence of economic thinking has become quite important. There is probably no other policy area where this shift is clearer than on climate change, and the development of the EU ETS is undoubtedly the most remarkable example of both developments. 

There are five key policy areas for the further development of organic farming in Europe. 

Although basic income support for needy jobseekers is foremost a genuine social policy programme to avoid poverty, it has a strong focus on the labour market. With Hartz IV the interface of social and labour market policy has been redefined and the traditional divide between both policy areas eroded. It focuses on need (not on unemployment as such) and on interventions to reduce need - with attempts at labour market integration featuring prominently as a promising way to end up benefit dependency. 

Another policy area for activation stands in-between social and tax policies. In comparative terms, the French social protection system is still dominantly funded by social contributions to the level of about 66% of the total bill in 2005 (Barbier and Theret 2004). However, in the 1990s it was agreed that indirect labour costs... 

Nevertheless, in the family policy area, reforms that pertain to the dynamics of activation have been implemented in the last years, albeit of limited scope. Apart from the modification of API s disregard rules already mentioned (see Sect. 3), the reform mainly entailed new calculation rules designed to smooth out the discrepancies of benefit amounts for housing benefits recipients, whether they were on minimum income benefits or employed. 

Supplier Involvement although one of the policy areas, no mention is made of the strategy by which the company is encouraging or insisting that its suppliers operate to appropriate environmental standards. 

Arguing less formally, it can be expected that the incentive to relax caps when linking will be weakened for several reasons the potential reputational damage, the threat of import quotas or other penalties, and the fact that linking partners could defect from cooperation in other policy areas as well. In any case, to make the choice of allowances assessable and transparent, mid- to long-term cap schedules should be defined prior to linking. 

The five private industry advisory subcommittees formed in these policy areas were supposed to manage their own operations, however, and so the planned structure did not stay that way for long. The Regulatory subcommittee broke up into three groups concerning health, safety, and the environment each group Issued its own report, and the three were Integrated into a first draft report. In Patents and Information, and in Procurement and Direct Support of R D, the subcommittees split and each produced their own reports which stood on their own. So we ended up with seven reports from the private sector Instead of five — if you haven t seen them, they re available from NTIS. We had so many requests for them that we re out. 

Structuring the DPR process in this way had certain implications and problems associated with it — as any structure would. It was obvious that there was going to be some overlapping among policy area subcommittees, and there was. The DPR staff tried to coordinate these overlaps as much as possible, but our preference was to duplicate rather than let something fall... 

From this point on, the DPR process went into executive session — Into the Executive Branch process. Interagency task forces operated in each of the seven policy areas, developing recommendations which were submitted to the DPR Steering Committee. 

We identified 42 major studies and about 400 public policy recommendations to stimulate innovation. It seems reasonable to ask why so many studies have been done and so little action taken. I have come up with six factors that I think are holding back action in the innovation policy area. These are not offered with the presumption that Government should or should not do something about innovation, but from the perspective of the analyst attempting to explain why so little action has been taken to date. I think, however, that these points can be useful to those who take a more advocatory position, although some of the problems may be relatively intractable. Before I list the six factors, I would note that they appear to fall into two categories limitations on data and analysis, and constraints on our ability to act politically. 

Occupational health and safety is another public policy area in which the broad current of social thought in favour of market solutions has been felt, especially in Australia. The claims mn parallel in some respects to those of the environmental debate government regulation is an inefficient way of ensuring worker health and safety it needs to be replaced with, or at least complemented by, a market approach this approach must restructure the market so that employers have an economic incentive to minimise occupational injury and disease. One suggestion made by some economists is to impose a no-fault injury tax on employers in proportion to the number and severity of injuries (Smith 1980). However, the best known method by which costs may be imposed back on the company is the workers compensation system. 

---