This article evaluates the revenue performance failings of the Yum! Center, a sports arena in Louisville, with the primary objective of explaining how a flawed deal arose in the first place. While the literature addressing public subsidization of sports facilities primarily contemplates economic impact underperformance, Louisville provides an extreme instance of failed financial performance leading to a bailout. The revenue challenges, arising from sales-tax increment financing and the lease agreement, link the arena to a wider literature on megaproject underperformance, characterized by three primary threads: rent-seeking, governance structures, and project cultures. This article evaluates the Yum! Center through representative lenses from each of these threads before offering key lessons for future projects.

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This paper evaluates two infrastructure mega-projects connected to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver's downtown peninsula: the renovation of BC Place Stadium and the Vancouver Convention Centre expansion. These projects correspond to two categories of mega-projects often constructed alongside sporting mega-events with intended tourism development legacies that have a history of financial underperformance. Touching upon literatures concerning megaevents, event leveraging, urban development, as well as the public finance of sport and convention venues, this work focuses on fiscal impacts and opportunity costs for venue site locations where there are already high property values, with the aim of providing lessons for comparable future mega-event hosts contemplating similar event related mega-projects. In addition to arguing for the alignment of venue design to efficiently maximize long term operating returns and event portfolios for tourism development, this article highlights that venue location within a host city shapes the opportunity costs for government investors and that cost overruns to meet a fixed event deadline can undermine what may other be a sustainable financial structure. While a mega-event related stadium or convention centre is at significant risk of becoming a financial loser when considering both capital and operating costs, as well as a suboptimal platform for maximising an event portfolio, this does not have to be the case. Beyond more traditional measures of project return, this article highlights and further develops another key measure of evaluating financial and revenue outcomes, which can be summed up as the opportunity cost of alternative land uses on a venue site.

Robert Sroka. Samoregulacja biznesowa w zakresie etyki biznesu firm zachodnich jako odpowiedź na łamanie praw pracowniczych w Chinach [Business self-regulation in terms of business ethics of Western companies as a response to violation of employee rights in China] edited by W. Banach, M.A. Michalski, J. Sójka, „Człowiek i Społeczeństwo” vol. XLVI: Między Chinami a Zachodem. Pytanie o źródła chińskiego sukcesu gospodarczego [Between China and the West. An inquiry into the sources of the Chinese economic miracle], Poznań 2018, pp. 145–158, Adam Mickiewicz University. Faculty of Social Sciences Press. ISSN 0239-3271.Salary that does not meet basic life needs, working conditions that threaten life and health, employing children, forced labor, lack of freedom of association, long hours of work, destroying the environment, widespread corruption is just the beginning of a long list of unethical behaviors of companies in China, as well as Western companies producing in China.Under the pressure of non-governmental organizations and consumer boycotts in Europe and the USA, business self-regulatory initiatives have been created to raise working conditions at Chinese suppliers. The most popular self-regulations initiatives in terms of business ethics are: Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI), Business Social Compliance Initiative (amforiBSCI), Social Accountability 8000 (SA8000), International Council of Toy Industries (ICTI). Conducting research on self-regulation in the field of business ethics of Western companies operating in China, I analyze three issues. The first is to describe the source of the need to apply such self-regulatory initiatives, which is the outsourcing business strategy. The second element is to define the minimum rules that are broken due to the use of an outsourcing strategy. The third point of consideration is the presentation of the self-regulatory initiatives.

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