Publications

Most OECD countries have made policies to reduce administrative burdens – cutting red tape – a political priority. Red tape is particularly burdensome to smaller companies and may inhibit entrepreneurship. These effects are more costly in global markets, where competitiveness can be affected by the efficiency of the domestic regulatory and administrative environment. But citizens and large firms also complain about unnecessary reporting requirements. Results are wanted. What can governments do? Strategies include setting quantitative targets to reduce administrative burdens when new regulations are drafted and by reviewing older regulations; codification; better multi-level co-ordination; and rapid introduction of e-government services. Supported by taskforces and advisory committees, governments increasingly locate responsibility in a central administrative unit. This “whole-of-government” approach represents a major step in recent years, embedding administrative simplification in the overall regulatory quality system at the national level.

The quest for “better” regulation is one being driven forward with a new urgency within the United Kingdom, the European Union and by international bodies such as the OECD. In this country, regulatory improvement strategies have been applied by governments for nearly 20 years and it is now appropriate to consider whether the better regulation movement is founded on secure approaches and assumptions; whether it is heading in the right conceptual direction, and, more particularly, whether it conduces to “smarter” regulatory regimes--regimes that offer the best mixtures of regulatory instruments and institutions. This article outlines the development of the better regulation movement within government, it describes the regulatory improvement tools that governments have deployed in furthering that movement, and then it considers the capacity of the “better regulation” approach to deliver smarter regulation. It will be argued that there are a number of identifiable reasons--practical and theoretical--why the better regulation movement may not readily conduce to the production of “smarter” regulatory policies and regimes.

Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) has emerged on the European political agenda. It is an idea whose time has come. Both the member states and the institutions of the European Union (EU) are presently investing in programmes for ‘better regulation’ and ‘good regulatory governance’. RIA is the cornerstone of these programmes. This paper explains how RIA is being diffused in Europe. Is the introduction of RIA in Europe simply the diffusion of an idea, the content of which remains very different in the various national contexts? Or, alternatively, has the diffusion of ideas brought about convergence at the level of how RIA is performed? As shown by Hahn and Litan (2004), European impact assessments are often different from North-American RIAs. This paper shows that the adoption of a common RIA ‘bottle’ has not produced similar European ‘wines’. The language of RIA has produced a community of discourse for policy-makers and has stimulated the introduction of some instruments that are similarly labelled ‘impact assessment’. But RIA practice may exist only on paper, and in some cases the ‘RIA label’ may reveal basic assessments of administrative burdens. The paper explains how ideas can be diffused without convergence of results. The argument here is not the trivial one that ‘context matters’, but how it matters. Hence the paper breaks down ‘context’ into four dimensions, that is, institutions, models of the policy process, actors, and legitimacy. Institutional design, the capacity to deal with distributional problems, heterogeneity in multi-level governance systems, policy styles, and the ‘weights’ given to the preferences of different RIA actors explain the lack of convergence.

The experimental approach in economics is a driving force behind some of the most exciting developments in the field. The 'experimental revolution' was based on a series of bold philosophical premises which have remained until now mostly unexplored. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis and critical discussion of the methodology of experimental economics, written by a philosopher of science with expertise in the field. It outlines the fundamental principles of experimental inference in order to investigate their power, scope and limitations. The author demonstrates that experimental economists have a lot to gain by discussing openly the philosophical principles that guide their work, and that philosophers of science have a lot to learn from their ingenious techniques devised by experimenters in order to tackle difficult scientific problems.

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This article presents the main results of a research project on regulatory impact analysis (RIA) in comparative perspective. Its main theoretical thrust is to explore the limitations of the conventional analysis of RIA in terms of de‐contextualised best practice and provide an alternative framework based on the lesson‐drawing literature. After having discussed how demand and supply of best practice emerge in the OECD and the European Union, some analytic (as opposed to normative) lessons are presented. The main lessons revolve around the politics of problem definition, the nesting of RIA into wider reform programmes, the political malleability of RIA, the trade‐off between precision and administrative assimilation, the roles of networks and watchdogs, and institutional learning. The conclusions discuss the implications of the findings for future research.