With the institutionalization of Europe's single market during the past decade, the Commission of the European Communities has faced dramatic changes in its policy environment. These include the intensified mobilization of firms and business associations that make new demands on Community regulatory regimes, and the accumulation of European Court of Justice decisions that alter the Commission's regulatory latitude. This essay examines developments in Community regulation of government aid to industry to assess how well the Commission has adapted to emerging constraints on its regulatory capacities. The essay finds that the Commission invited representatives of the national governments of EU countries to legislate conditions for applying regulations on government aid to industry in the mid-to-late 1990s - in a policy area in which the Commission in the past guarded its autonomy closely - not due to pressures from national governments, but as a response by the Commission's state aid policy unit to potential constraints on its regulatory capacities.

When Western counties seek to reform welfare so that recipients have to work in return for aid, this poses implementation as well as policy problems. This study of work requirements in Wisconsin illustrates the challenges. It also confirms success of a top-down model of implementation. Wisconsin's welfare work programs had little impact on dependency through the mid 1980s because work was not a priority and work programs were underdeveloped. From 1985-6, however, the state increased funding and built up the employment bureaucracy. It required that more recipients participate in work programs, enter jobs rather than education, and avoid welfare if possible. It attuned the bureaucracy to its goals through funding incentives. These measures along with strong economic conditions then drove the welfare rolls down, with largely good effects. Wisconsin's achievement rested on its good-government traditions. Not all regimes have the same capacity.

Cross-subsidization is a frequent topic in public debates and often stigmatized in the wake of deregulation. Public monopolies increasingly find themselves operating not only in regulated markets, but in non-regulated markets where they are accused of illegally using resources from the regulated market to stifle competition. Similar anticompetitive allegations can be made against private multiservice firms with market power. However, definitions of cross-subsidization are many and this affects the debate about the issue and possible strategic motives behind cross-subsidization, its possible consequences for competition, and measures that might be taken against it. This paper organizes definitions that regulators are likely to encounter into three types involving cost transfer, temporary loss or permanent loss. Based on these distinctions, a novel classification framework is developed according to underlying motivation and consequences for competition. The four cases arising from the framework are subsequently discussed in terms of relevancy for public and private firms, and consequences for competition and welfare.

In recent years Denmark has seen a huge corporatization and privatization program. As it is an unlikely reformer, the policy shift makes the country an interesting test case for the analysis of public sector changes. The paper argues that the Danish corporatization and privatization program fits into a general pattern. The program has been successfully implemented because it has allowed the governing coalition to reap important short-term political benefits without compromising a long-term quest for political control. However, these radical changes that together constitute a virtual wave of reforms have been initiated because politicians belonging to the governing coalition have come to the knowledge of new theoretic and empirical insights that open their eyes to short-term political benefits formerly unacknowledged.