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Laws and regulations govern the everyday life of businesses and citizens, and are important tools of public policy. Regulating has never been easy, but the overwhelming pace of technological change and unprecedented interconnectedness of economies has made it a daunting task. The 2018 Regulatory Policy Outlook, the second in the series, maps country efforts to improve regulatory quality in line with the 2012 OECD Recommendation on Regulatory Policy and Governance, and shares good regulatory practices. It provides unique insights into the organisation and institutional settings in countries for designing, enforcing and revising regulations. It also highlights areas of the regulatory cycle that receive too little attention from policy makers. Finally, it identifies areas where countries can invest to improve the quality of laws and regulations and presents innovative approaches to better regulation.

In recent years, sunset clauses have mostly been associated with emergency legislation introduced in the wake of terrorist attacks. However, as this book demonstrates, they have a long history and a substantial constitutional impact on the separation of powers and the rule of law. In addition, the constitutional value of such clauses is examined from certain neglected normative aspects pertaining to concepts such as deliberative and consensus democracy, parliamentary sovereignty and constitutional dialogue. The work is an amalgam of three perspectives: the historical, the positive and the normative. All three are intertwined and each subsequent part builds upon the findings of the previous one. The historical perspective investigates the historical development of sunset clauses since the first Parliaments in England. The positive perspective examines the legal effect and the contemporary utility of sunset clauses. Finally, the normative perspective analyses their interaction with several models of separation of powers, and their influence on the dialogue between various institutions as it values their impact on the rule of law, formal and substantive. The detailed examination of this topical subject will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy makers.

This Article, which takes into account developments up until summer 2017, evaluates the early days of regulatory engagement with blockchain technology. My analysis unfolds in three parts. First, I provide a cursory overview of the technology itself to highlight considerable uncertainties concerning its future. Regulators asked to engage with distributed ledgers are thus compelled to regulate the unknown. Second, I will introduce a typology of regulatory strategies adopted to date and highlight their respective advantages and shortcomings. Third, I will outline a number of guiding principles regulators should follow in respect of blockchain technology. I will make the argument that despite the technology's uncertain future, early regulatory engagement is warranted as a young technology is a malleable technology. As technology develops, law has to adapt. As a consequence, I put forward a number of regulatory techniques, including a process of polycentric co-regulation that relies on the regulatory potential of (blockchain) software and the adoption of a so-called “28th regime” at the EU level which may help navigate the uncertainties of blockchain development and regulation.

Prior to the global financial crisis, financial innovation was viewed very positively, resulting in a laissez-faire, deregulatory approach to financial regulation. Since the crisis the regulatory pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Post-crisis regulation, plus rapid technological change, have spurred the development of financial technology (FinTech). FinTech firms and data-driven financial service providers profoundly challenge the current regulatory paradigm. Financial regulators increasingly seek to balance the traditional regulatory objectives of financial stability and consumer protection with promoting growth and innovation. The resulting regulatory innovations include RegTech, regulatory sandboxes, and special charters. This Article analyzes possible new regulatory approaches, ranging from doing nothing (which spans being permissive to highly restrictive, depending on context), cautious permissiveness (on a case-by-case basis, or through special charters), structured experimentalism (such as sandboxes or piloting), and development of specific new regulatory frameworks. Building on this framework, we argue for a new regulatory approach, which incorporates these rebalanced objectives, and which we term ‘smart regulation.’ Our new automated and proportionate regime builds on shared principles from a range of jurisdictions and supports innovation in financial markets. The fragmentation of market participants and the increased use of technology requires regulators to adopt a sequential reform process, starting with digitization, before building digitally-smart regulation. This Article provides a roadmap for this process.

This report summarises the results of the study ‘Assessing the impacts of EU regulatory barriers on innovation’. To obtain the necessary data, a European-wide survey was conducted in 2016. This study focused on four sectors: energy, food, health and water. Each of these four sectors addressed the innovation system and regulatory framework, alongside questions on challenges, innovation drivers and barriers. While regulatory barriers to innovation were identified for the whole economy as well as within the four sectoral studies, the overall impact of regulation on innovation is predominantly neutral to positive. The main regulatory barrier identified concerns ‘conflicting regulation’ rather than a single type of regulation. The study also found that compliance with regulation creates innovation, with a net gain of EUR 3-6 billion per year in additional innovation investments and in terms of employment a net gain of 120 000 additional jobs. Removing existing regulatory barriers could release up to EUR 4-8 billion on general innovation investment per year.

This article presents the findings of an extensive multi‐method empirical study that explored the relationship between temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance. Temporary (or “sunset”) legislation – statutory provisions enacted for a limited time and set to expire unless their validity is extended – is often hailed as a key tool for promoting experimental and better regulation. Despite the importance of temporary legislation and the burgeoning theoretical scholarship on the subject, there is still a dearth of empirical studies about how temporary legislation is used in practice. The lack of empirical evidence creates a lacuna in at least three areas of theoretical scholarship, concerning temporary legislation, better regulation, and experimentalist governance. This paper is a first step to fill this gap.

This is the second Activity Report on the work of the European Parliament in the fields of Ex-Ante Impact Assessment and European Added Value. (A first Activity Report, covering the period from June 2012 to June 2014, was published in September 2014). It provides an overview of the work carried out by the Directorate for Impact Assessment and European Added Value within the Parliament’s administration between June 2014 and December 2015, in support of oversight and scrutiny of the executive by parliamentary committees, in the fields specifically of: (i) ex-ante impact assessment; (ii) European added value; and (iii) ex-post evaluation. During the first 18 months of the current 2014-19 parliamentary term, a total of 145 pieces of work were published by the Directorate, encompassing some 6,500 pages of tex

On January 30, 2017, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 13,771, which directs each agency to repeal at least two existing regulations before issuing a new regulation (referred to as the “one‐in‐two‐out” requirement) and imposes a regulatory budget that sets a cap on total incremental regulatory costs (set at zero for fiscal year 2017). The regulatory budget concept has been kicked around for decades, while the one‐in‐two‐out requirement is more recent and has been implemented in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia to various extents. Legal scholars and commentators have been quick to opine on the Order, with some pointing out ways in which it is irrational or impractical and others defending aspects of the Order such as the imposition of a regulatory budget. In this Essay, we take a somewhat different approach by evaluating how well the Order is likely to achieve its purpose of helping agencies “be prudent and financially responsible in the expenditure of funds.” Although vaguely laudable, this purpose is illaudably vague. We will therefore ground our analysis by defining the goal (or goals) of the Order according to priorities that have been adopted by prior administrations or promoted by scholars, commentators, or interest groups. For purposes of this analysis, we take no normative position on whether these end goals are desirable. The three potential goals that we evaluate the Order against are: (1) increasing the net benefits of regulations, (2) decreasing regulatory burdens, and (3) increasing presidential control over agencies. We then compare the Order against regulatory reform efforts in other countries. We conclude that the Order is unlikely to sensibly (much less prudently or responsibly) achieve any of these goals without significant changes

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