Environmental social controls (ESCs) such as mandatory disclosure, regulations, subsidies, and stakeholder opinion are intended to improve firm environmental performance. This paper reports ESC importance to Australian financial managers in making capital investment decisions. A decision-making experiment showed managers to be most responsive to stakeholder opinion (42 per cent), followed by subsidization (26 per cent) and regulatory cost (22 per cent). Mandatory disclosure has very little influence (10 per cent). ESC interaction effects are limited so coordination of ESC policy is not a primary concern. High degrees of managerial self-insight suggest policy changes would be enhanced by close consultations with the managers involved. Copyright (c) The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2006 AFAANZ.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine Australian exporter perceptions of export credit insurance (ECI) value and ECI value drivers to help uncover how Australian (and other) exporters can optimize their ECI use. Design/methodology/approach -This paper uses a 1,000 firm survey of how Australian ECI users and non-users perceive the value of often-cited attributes of ECI and multiple regression analysis to create a model of ECI value drivers. Findings -Most ECI value is derived from the increased trade exporters can manage with ECI protection and from improved access to trade finance. Clear differences are observable in perceived ECI value between larger and smaller exporters as well as between ECI users and non-users. Originality/value -This paper provides the first evidence of perceived ECI value to Australian exporters as well as differences between ECI users and non-users. Export credit insurers and export support agencies need to focus on these differences to ensure that ECI is being optimally marketed and used by Australian exporters.

This paper looks at how environmental social controls (ESCs), namely mandatory disclosure, regulation, subsidies and stakeholder opinion, are perceived in terms of their relative importance by Australian capital investment managers. We fi nd that regulation and stakeholder opinion are the most important ESCs. Subsidies generally have less infl uence, while mandatory disclosure has almost no impact on capital investment decisions. However, even the more important ESCs have much less than impact than mainstream fi nancial and strategic factors. Policy makers seeking to infl uence capital investment managers will have to increase the power levels of the various ESCs if they are to change behaviour. Copyright