FTC questioning shared services' antitrust impact.

The flagship of the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory reinvention initiative, Project XL has been touted as a regulatory blueprint for a site-specific, performance-based pollution-control system, but widespread complaints about the costs of the program beg the question of whether the costs of tailoring regulations to individual facilities are manageable. To address this question, this paper presents original survey data on a sample of 11 XL projects. We find that the fixed costs of putting in place XL agreements are substantial, averaging over $450,000 per firm. While stakeholder negotiations are widely cited as the principal source for these costs, we find that they actually arise mainly from interaction between participating facilities and the EPA. Moreover, EPA management problems are perceived by our survey respondents as having inflated project development costs. Finally, we find that the key factors that explains differences in costs across XL projects are the scope and complexity of the project proposal. These findings suggest that Project XL favors large firms that can afford to pay significant project development costs, that EPA management problems must be resolved to reduce costs, and that there may be a significant economic bias against complex and innovative proposals--precisely the type of proposals that Project XL was designed to foster in order to improve the efficiency of the regulatory system.

Commerce↗

PubMed2001

Choose a variety of grains daily, especially whole grains: a challenge for consumers.

The 2000 edition of Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans is the first to include a specific guideline for grain foods, separate from fruits and vegetables, and recognize the unique health benefits of whole grains. This paper describes and evaluates major tools for assessing intakes of total grains and whole grains, reviews current data on who consumes grain foods and where, and describes individual- and market-level factors that may influence grain consumption. Aggregate food supply data show that U.S. consumers have increased their intake of grain foods from record low levels in the 1970s, but consumption of whole-grain foods remains low. Data on individual intakes show that consumption of total grains was above the recommended 6 serving minimum in 1994-1996, but consumption of whole grains was only one third of the 3 daily servings many nutritionists recommend. Increased intake of whole-grain foods may be limited by a lack of consumer awareness of the health benefits of whole grains, difficulty in identifying whole-grain foods in the marketplace, higher prices for some whole-grain foods, consumer perceptions of inferior taste and palatability, and lack of familiarity with preparation methods. In July 1999, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized a health claim that should both make it easier for consumers to identify and select whole-grain foods and have a positive effect on the availability of these foods in the marketplace.

Commerce↗