個案總覽

In 2008, British Columbia became one of the few jurisdictions in the world to successfully implement a comprehensive carbon tax. The architect of the tax, Premier Gordon Campbell, championed the broad-based carbon tax that applied to nearly all fossil fuels and made it "revenue neutral." Every dollar raised from the tax would be returned to BC residents and businesses in the form of personal income and corporate tax cuts. Campbell was an unlikely proponent of the carbon tax. As the leader of the traditionally conservative BC Liberal Party, he had cut taxes in the past, but now he had reason to believe a revenue neutral carbon tax could be a winner for both the environment and the economy. But with elections just months away and growing public distrust of the tax, combined with a noisy campaign against the tax mounted by the opposition New Democratic Party, the tax's fate, and that of Campbell's political career was far from certain. This case provides an insider's account of how the carbon tax was designed, with the strong role Premier Gordon Campbell played in its creation. It also explores political and other challenges the government faced when designing and implementing the tax.

This sequel accompanies case KS1170. In 2008, British Columbia became one of the few jurisdictions in the world to successfully implement a comprehensive carbon tax. The architect of the tax, Premier Gordon Campbell, championed the broad-based carbon tax that applied to nearly all fossil fuels and made it "revenue neutral." Every dollar raised from the tax would be returned to BC residents and businesses in the form of personal income and corporate tax cuts. Campbell was an unlikely proponent of the carbon tax. As the leader of the traditionally conservative BC Liberal Party, he had cut taxes in the past, but now he had reason to believe a revenue neutral carbon tax could be a winner for both the environment and the economy. But with elections just months away and growing public distrust of the tax, combined with a noisy campaign against the tax mounted by the opposition New Democratic Party, the tax's fate, and that of Campbell's political career was far from certain. This case provides an insider's account of how the carbon tax was designed, with the strong role Premier Gordon Campbell played in its creation. It also explores political and other challenges the government faced when designing and implementing the tax.

Twenty years after the end of Apartheid, South Africa's democracy persists, albeit with problems. A tripartite coalition - the African National Congress, the labor unions, and the Communist Party - still controls the political system but with diminishing economic results and authority. Since 2010, the economy has grown at 1.4% annually, with unemployment at 25%. Several national plans have been initiated but none with success. Most recently, the National Development Plan is the Zuma administration's approach. And then, at the end of 2015, cronyism sunk the stock market and the currency, causing a political crisis. Pravin Gordhan, an experienced bureaucrat, is once again Finance Minister but faces the tradeoff between growth and debt reduction. With the recent resignation of Zuma and the instatement of former deputy president and wealthy businessman Cyril Ramaphosa as President, it was still to be determined if a change in leadership would be enough to improve the country's economic and social situation.

SIAM was born in 1910, in Buenos Aires (Argentina), as a manufacturing company of bread making machines or bread mixers. In only a few decades, the company had diversified its production, becoming the largest metallurgical company in South America. During the first fifty years of existence, SIAM learned how to successfully adjust to the changes in the Argentine scenario, shifting from an open and deregulated economy to an increasingly closed and highly-regulated system. However, from the 1960s onwards, SIAM started to experience a series of productive, organizational and financial adversities, until its final crisis in the 1970s. In that sense, the case study (divided into two parts, A and B), offers relevant information to discuss the various decisions the companies made, in light of the opportunities and obstacles encountered, within a series of contexts marked by an overall growing level of regulation, uncertainty and institutional and macro-economic imbalance. Is SIAM's meteoric rise a synthesis of the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) period in Latin America, phase in which the State promoted industrialization oriented to the domestic market as a development strategy? Or is this an example of a firm with an extremely ambitious diversification policy and with management problems?

SIAM was born in 1910, in Buenos Aires (Argentina), as a manufacturing company of bread making machines or bread mixers. In only a few decades, the company had diversified its production, becoming the largest metallurgical company in South America. During the first fifty years of existence, SIAM learned how to successfully adjust to the changes in the Argentine scenario, shifting from an open and deregulated economy to an increasingly closed and highly-regulated system. However, from the 1960s onwards, SIAM started to experience a series of productive, organizational and financial adversities, until its final crisis in the 1970s. In that sense, the case study (divided into two parts, A and B), offers relevant information to discuss the various decisions the companies made, in light of the opportunities and obstacles encountered, within a series of contexts marked by an overall growing level of regulation, uncertainty and institutional and macro-economic imbalance. Is SIAM's meteoric rise a synthesis of the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) period in Latin America, phase in which the State promoted industrialization oriented to the domestic market as a development strategy? Or is this an example of a firm with an extremely ambitious diversification policy and with management problems?

Sequel to case 713039.

An engineer and technology entrepreneur, Nobu Okada, had turned a mid-life crisis into a bold-some would say quixotic-quest to prevent a tragedy of the commons at the global scale. Namely, Okada believed the accumulation of debris in near-Earth orbital space posed a serious threat to a vast array of critical satellites and, thereby, both the modern information economy and the future of human activities in space. Frustrated at what he saw as far too slow a reaction to the threat among major space powers, Okada planned to develop a spacecraft capable of adhering to, and redirecting, that debris. By lowering the costs of debris removal, he hoped to make it routine, even in the absence of government action. As of 2016 his company, Astroscale, which had secured private funding years earlier, was nearing the first demonstration of the technology. This case is intended to help students understand how a tragedy of the commons develops in a specific, nearly textbook example. As important, this case is about potential solutions to the tragedy of the commons when the market and policy both fall short.

In 1950 it looked highly doubtful that Indian democracy would hold -- typical family income was $6 a month, only about 15 percent of the population was literate, there were deep religious and ethnic differences, and more than a dozen national languages were spoken. But after a half a century, India had proved to be the first democracy anywhere near so poor to survive. Why? As well, in 1950 India's economic prospects looked bright for a developing country -- it had a well trained government bureaucracy bequeathed by the British, a secure legal system, national railroads, and more advanced industry than, for example, China. Why did the economy do so poorly?

Suncor, Canada's largest producer of "oil sands," faces a host of issues involving prices, costs, and the environment. The Government of Canada recently put an explicit limit on carbon emissions from oil sands, and a price on carbon. Suncor, which produces more than 400,000 barrels per day of bitumen and synthetic oil must reduce its emissions at the same time that crude oil prices have been dropping. Reduction of cash operating costs, therefore, becomes key. Yet environmental organizations in the USA remain adamantly opposed to the production of oil sands and its movement into the USA by either pipeline (e.g., Keystone XL) or railcar. The concrescence of this issues poses immense challenges to Suncor management.

It is September 2013. The new Chinese President Xi Jinping will soon launch his tour in Central Asia. On this tour, the President is deciding whether to launch a grand investment strategy, which he calls "One Belt One Road" (OBOR). Through this plan, he hopes to achieve a range of economic, domestic, and geopolitical goals. Economically, China needs to transition into a growth model that is sustainable but still delivers high growth rates. Domestically, Xi needs to boost the popularity of the Communist Party and consolidate his power relative to other factions. Geopolitically, China is seeking to gain political leverage in Central Asia. Critics of the plan have raised a variety of concerns, including the profitability of the investments, its impact on the government's efforts to transition to a sustainable growth model, and the potential for backlash to the plan's geopolitical ambitions.

The case chronicles the development of Temasek Holdings, an investment company owned by the Singapore government from its inception in 1974 to 2015. It describes the different roles undertaken by the company in Singapore's economic transformation. Temasek functioned by the philosophy that its portfolio companies' decision-making process had to demonstrate transparency and accountability, which were brought about by institutionalizing good corporate governance practices, and not through its own participation in the management of the entities.

Jeff Bezos, six years after starting a revolution in retailing with Amazon.com, turned his life-long passion for space into a start-up, Blue Origin. Blue (as it was called) was a part of the New Space industry, a collection of startup aerospace engineering companies that were intent on disrupting the American space sector with new technologies, management approaches, and competitive pressure. NASA hoped to leverage New Space to outsource its near-Earth activities and refocus its own efforts on deep space exploration. One of the agency's main mechanisms for this shift of activities was its Commercial Crew Development program (CCDev), a multi-phase initiative launched in 2009. Blue participated in the first two rounds of CCDev, and by all accounts these had been win-win experiences for it and NASA. The decision point of the case is whether Blue should participate in the third, much larger, and more complex, stage of CCDev. The trade-off facing Blue's leaders was between the legitimacy, expertise, and funding provided by working with NASA and the autonomy, efficiency, and independence threatened by working with NASA. How would Blue, with its clear respect for NASA but its desire (and financial ability) to set its own priorities, make this decision?

Paul had opposed the Fed for decades and had offered several bills to dismantle it, dating back to 1983. As with all of his previous attempts, the 2009 bill died in committee. Although few members of Congress shared Paul's desire to eliminate the Fed, the central bank's unprecedented interventions during the 2007-2009 financial crisis provoked new sources of resistance. At a minimum, many more Americans were curious about the inner workings of the Fed, whose activities and decisions were frequently wrapped in secrecy. From its earliest days, the Fed's supporters had insisted that monetary policy had to be separated from electoral politics to prevent the manipulation of the money supply and interest rates for short-term political gain. Increasingly, however, critics questioned whether the costs of Federal Reserve independence and secrecy might outweigh the benefits. By late 2009, mounting concerns in Congress had breathed new life into one of Representative Paul's milder proposals for containing the Fed. Though his ultimate goal was to "end the Fed," Paul had also repeatedly proposed a full audit of the institution. By November 19, 2009, his latest audit bill had attracted 313 cosponsors, a record level of support, and the House Financial Services Committee was scheduled to vote that very day on whether to append a version of the proposal to a major financial reform bill that was then taking shape in Congress. If the audit provision became law, it would represent a notable change in policy, providing an unprecedented window on Fed activities and raising significant new questions about the nature of central bank independence in America.

On the afternoon of June 21, 1982, the Florida Senate prepared to vote on whether to ratify the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, which stated that "Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Supporters believed the ERA was essential to winning equal rights for women. Opponents claimed that the proposed amendment would dangerously expand federal power over the states, remove needed protections for women, and undermine the American family. When Congress had sent the ERA to the states for ratification, in March 1972, it had done so through a joint resolution stipulating that state legislatures had to ratify it within seven years. As the deadline neared, however, only 35 of the requisite 38 states had voted to ratify the amendment, four of which later voted to rescind ratification, though ERA supporters questioned the constitutionality of rescission. In October 1978, Congress extended the ratification deadline to June 30, 1982, a move that ERA opponents denounced as unconstitutional. Over the next several years, one more state voted to rescind, and no new states ratified. In 1982, ERA supporters made a final push for ratification. That June, the governor of Florida, an ERA supporter, called the state legislature into special session to consider, among other issues, approval of the ERA. If Florida ratified, supporters hoped that Illinois and either Oklahoma or North Carolina would quickly follow. On June 21, thousands of demonstrators, both for and against the amendment, converged on the state capitol in Tallahassee. That morning, the Florida House voted in favor of the ERA, 60 to 58. Now it was up to the Florida Senate to decide whether to ratify the amendment or to kill it.

In January 1965, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement in the United States, launched a campaign of civil disobedience in Selma, Alabama, to bring national attention to disenfranchisement of black voters in the South. On Sunday, March 7, as part of this campaign, 400 mostly black protesters, not including King, tried to march across the Pettus Bridge, just outside Selma, only to be stopped by state troopers and local lawmen, who attacked them with tear gas and clubs. That night, all three national television networks broadcast film of the assault. The broadcasts sparked outrage against the attackers and sympathy protests across the country. King announced that he would lead a renewed march over the bridge on Tuesday, March 9. By early Tuesday morning, however, King had learned that President Lyndon Johnson, whose help he needed to win federal voting rights legislation, did not want him to march, and that a federal judge had issued a restraining order against the march until a hearing could be held. King thought his supporters' passions were so strong that he might not be able to cancel the march even if he wanted to, yet the modern civil rights movement had never before defied a federal court order. President Johnson's representatives told King that he might avoid violating the judge's order if he marched to the bridge and then turned around before crossing it. King did not say what he would do, however, and few of his supporters knew about the turnaround possibility. Several hours later, with television cameras recording the unfolding events, King led 2000 marchers to the bridge, where state troopers and lawmen waited. Should he try to turn the march around, which his followers might not accept, or try to cross the bridge, contrary to the president's wishes and a federal restraining order?