Better Regulation - A Critical Assessment (original) (raw)

Better Regulation: a critical assessment (2010)

"This report is on the European Commission's "better regulation" programme. The Commission is promising that scrapping or revising a number of directives will save businesses around 40 billion euros by reducing the "administrative formalities" they impose. In Better Regulation: a critical assessment, Laurent Vogel (ETUI) and Eric Van den Abeele (University of Mons) reveal the agenda within the agenda. In the first part of the report entitled "Making lies sound truthful", Laurent Vogel dissects the methods used by the audit firms and consultancies contracted by the Commission to do the study that came up with the figure of 40 billion euros in savings. "The method seems never to have been looked at by economics and statistics researchers to see if it stands up", finds the author. More alarmingly still, "there are also some instances of blatant figure-massaging to meet the sponsors' political agendas". The author also criticizes the Commission's inordinate reliance on the work of a group of experts appointed to support the "Better Regulation" programme. Most of the group - known as the Stoiber Group after its chairman, the former conservative premier of Bavaria - are highly pro-deregulationist. The report points out that in addition to his job of advising the Commission, Mr Stoiber has since 11 November 2009, been Chairman of the Advisory Board of Deloitte, one of the firms involved in carrying out the study concerned. The second part of the report is equally damning. "Better Regulation: a new religion trying to spread the word?" asks Eric Van den Abeele. The author sets the exercise within the ideological context of the early 1990s that spawned it, and gives a broad brush picture of its development to the present day. Staring out as a 'Better Lawmaking' agenda to improve the quality of drafting of legislation, the aim now seems to have shifted from improving directives to simply scrapping those suspected of doing most harm to business competitiveness."

Regulation and Labour Market Performance

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

1. To be published in G. Galli and J. Pelkmans (eds.), Regulatory Reform, Market Functioning and Competitiveness, Edward Elgar, 2000. We thank Giampaolo Galli, Jaques Pelkmans and Paolo Sestito as well as participants in the Workshop on "Regulatory Reform, Competitiveness and Market Functioning" for helpful comments on a previous draft of the paper. The views expressed in this paper are our own and should not be held to represent those of the OECD or its Member governments.

Labour Market Regulation: Some Comparative Lessons

Economic Affairs, 2005

Labour market regulation that undermines freedom of contract leads to fewer, higher productivity jobs with employment being across a narrower range of ages. More people are excluded from the labour market, in highly regulated countries and they remain unemployed for longer. This seems to be damaging to welfare. It is possible that the extent of regulation is explained by the relative ability of those who gain from regulation (those in work) to influence the outcome of political processes to a greater extent than those who lose (the unemployed). However, the legal framework and legal traditions may also play a part.

Risks For Efficiency: Comprehensive Reform of Direct Regulation

Academy of Management Review, 1984

Conflicting models of regulatory decision making/legislative choice are presented and evaluated. A limited nationality model oriented to the common good is proposed as more complete and no less accurate than alternatives. The implication of this model is that many regulatory policies are mistakes and that under specified conditions these mistakes may be avoided or corrected. This paper attempts to clarify the options for reform of direct regulation along a magnitude of change dimensions: incremental versus comprehensive reform. It asks whether reform is best achieved through incremental or marginal adjustments to existing policy or through comprehensive change and equilibrium to new policy. Regulation is defined here as the imposition by government of rules that are backed by penalties and specifically intended to modify the economic behavior of entities in the private sector. An essential characteristic of this definition is its emphasis on rules or commands requiring or prohibiting specified behaviors. A second is its exclusive concern with economic behavior; rules based on moral or ethical precepts are explicitly excluded from this definition, although it is acknowledged that theft, tax evasion, drug dealing, and even murder have an economic dimension and that the imposition of economic regulation implies a moral or ethical obligation to obey. A third characteristic is its exclusive concern with the behavior of private sector entities; governmental efforts to achieve selfcontrol or the control of subordinate jurisdictions also are explicitly excluded from this definition. For various definitions of regulation, see Dubnick (1982); Mitnick (1980) Noll (1978); Priest, Stanbury, and Thompson (1980); Thompson and Jones (1982). Regulation may be classified according to a variety of attributes. Direct regulation is used here as a shorthand way of saying: regulation directed at firms, in their role as producers of goods and services (rather than as employers, producers of positive or negative spillovers etc.) that participate in specified industries (e.g. natural gas, surface freight, etc.), and intended to benefit individuals or firms in their role as consumers of goods and services. The activities performed under this rubric include the control of price, market entry, price discrimination or product differentiations practices, and terms of service and/or product quality attributes. The focus of this paper is direct regulation. Consequently, the arguments and conclusions it presents may not and in some cases clearly do not apply to other forms of regulation, for example, the so-called "new social" regulation directed at the control of hazardous products, working conditions, or pollutants or "framework" regulation directed at protecting intellectual property, requiring financial disclosure, or prohibiting anticompetitive practices. Reform as the term is used here means movement toward reliance on more appropriate institutional arrangements. Comprehensive reform involves the choice among broad classes of institutionai arrangements, that is, regulation, public ownership, competitive markets, and so on. Marginal reform (or adjustment) involves choices among design elements and their configuration within a single institutional arrangement: for example, given direct regulation, choices involving prices allowed, rigidity of entry barriers and so on.

Regulation and Economic Performance : Literature Review November 2010

2010

Regulations and institutional factors can determine economic performance by influencing the efficiency with which the product and labour markets operate. This paper reviews the main theoretical channels by which regulation can have an impact on economic outcomes, such as productivity, investment, innovation and employment, and examine some of the empirical relationships found in the literature. The paper highlights evidence that points to positive effects that de-regulation of the product markets have on performance, , focusing especially on the indirect effects associated with de-regulation of key services sectors. Special attention is paid to two services sectors widely sheltered from competition forces, namely professional services and the financial sector. The paper also discusses aspects of labour market regulation. It concludes that the channels underpinning associations between regulation and performance in service sectors remain largely unexplored and further empirical work ...