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As the sources of commuting traffic, companies have an important role in the mobility debate. In recent years, they have developed a variety of initiatives to improve the mobility of their employees. Though, their visions and actions are often neglected in the research literature. This paper aims at identifying the "good practices" of mobility policies of workplaces located in Belgium. To achieve this objective, existing researches and two large-scale Belgian surveys of commuting are analysed. First, a classification method is applied to the data in order to identify the workplaces where the alternative modes of transport which are promoted by the policy are popular among employees. Then, quantitative analyses are performed to find out what the good practices of mobility policies are.The results show that the best way of promoting an alternative mode of transport depends on the company's characteristics. The promotion of bicycles suits small workplaces best, while larger workplaces and those located in built-up areas or city centres suit the promotion of public transport best. Financial incentives, provision of facilities, diffusion of information, and parking management play all an important role in mobility management.

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This paper aims at testing yardstick competition among the local jurisdictions of the Walloon Region (Southern part of Belgium) by directly testing its seminal hypothesis: yardstick voting. Actually the theory states that local incumbents are mimicking each other because they fear punishment for implementing higher tax rates than in neighbouring jurisdictions. Our research question is whether voters punish their incumbents for higher tax rates. We estimate different specifications of a vote function. None of them supports the yardstick voting hypothesis. One can thus exclude yardstick voting being statistically supported by taxpayers' behaviour. And we can exclude yardstick competition as a source of tax interactions in the region if yardstick voting is a testable hypothesis of yardstick competition. Indeed, if tax rates of the neighbouring jurisdictions do not influence voters' choices, incumbents do not have to fear an electoral punishment and then mimicking each other is meaningless.

Three sources of strategic tax interactions among local jurisdictions are usually considered in the literature: public expenditure spill-over, tax competition and yardstick competition. However, another source has now been suggested: the intellectual trend. According to that hypothesis, politicians of the same party tend to behave similarly: incumbents of the same party mimic each other's policies. Moreover partisan politics may also act through a monopoly power effect linked to several terms of power for the same party, consecutively: a political party is more likely to have implemented tax rates corresponding to its ideology if it has ruled the municipality several legislatures in a row. The paper proposes an empirical analysis of tax interactions among Walloon municipalities (the Southern part of Belgium) in view of discriminating among the sources of interaction. Yardstick hypothesis, intellectual trend hypothesis and potential partisan monopoly power effect are tested. Spatial econometrics tools are used along a panel of local tax rates data from 1983 to 2008 and political data. Results confirm the existence of yardstick competition among Walloon municipalities but not that of behaviors in line with the intellectual trend hypothesis. Moreover evidence is found of a partisan monopoly power effect: several successive legislatures with a sole left-wing party in power increase the tax rates. Finally the presence of an electoral cycle is also clearly documented.

The renewed interest for sustainable transport in Europe is often labelled as mobility management. With this, major attention goes towards the role of employers in the commuting behaviour of their employees. Indeed, employers can encourage a more sustainable commuting by the promotion of alternative modes, like public transport, carpooling and/or cycling, by the designation of an Employee Transport Coordinator, through their location policy, and/or by adapting work schedules and the organisation of telework. An overview of these measures is followed by an analysis of the Belgian situation. The Belgian 2005 questionnaire Home-to-WorkTravel (HTWT) enables us to make an inventory of mobility management in Belgium. The database HTWT contains information on 7460 worksites. Besides having data on modal split, work regimes and accessibility problems, 38 different mobility management measures are checked in the questionnaire. Given that we assume a relationship between accessibility problems and sustainable commuting measures both are incorporated in one analysis. Binary exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to make a classification and to obtain a better insight in the structure of the variables. However, no strong link between accessibility problems on the one hand and sustainable commuting measures on the other hand could be detected. Despite the absence of this link, a classification of mobility management measures and accessibility problems has been made. This indicates that employers regularly choose to implement a set of related sustainable commuting measures.