Regulatory economics

Regulatory economics is the economics of regulation, in the sense of the application of law by government or an independent agency for various purposes, such as remedying market failure, protecting the environment, centrally-planning an economy, enriching well-connected firms, or benefiting politicians (see Regulatory capture). It is not considered to include voluntary regulation that may be accomplished in the private sphere.

Regulation

Public services can encounter conflict between commercial procedures (e.g. maximizing profit), and the interests of the people using these services (see market failure), as well as the interests of those not directly involved in transactions (externalities). Most governments therefore have some form of control or regulation to manage these possible conflicts. This regulation ensures that a safe and appropriate service is delivered, while not discouraging the effective functioning and development of businesses.

For example, the sale and consumption of alcohol and prescription drugs are controlled by regulation in most countries, as are the food business, provision of personal or residential care, public transport, construction, film and TV, etc. Monopolies are often regulated, especially those that are difficult to abolish (natural monopoly). The financial sector is also highly regulated.

Regulation can have several elements:

This differs from regulation in any voluntary sphere of activity, but can be compared with it in some respects. For example, when a broker purchases a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, there are explicit rules of conduct the broker must conform to as contractual and agreed-upon conditions that govern participation. The coercive regulations of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, are imposed without regard for any individual's consent or dissent as to that particular trade. However, in a democracy, there is still collective agreement on the constraint—the body politic as a whole agrees, through its representatives, and imposes the agreement on the subset of entities participating in the regulated activity.

Other examples of voluntary compliance in structured settings include the activities of Major League Baseball, FIFA (the international governing body for professional soccer), and the Royal Yachting Association (the UK's recognized national association for sailing). Regulation in this sense approaches the ideal of an accepted standard of ethics for a given activity, to promote the best interests of the people participating as well as the acceptable continuation of the activity itself within specified limits.

In America, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the government engaged in substantial regulation of the economy. In the 18th century, the production and distribution of goods were regulated by British government ministries over the American Colonies (see mercantilism). Subsidies were granted to agriculture and tariffs were imposed, sparking the American Revolution. The United States government maintained a high tariff throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century until the Reciprocal Tariff Act was passed in 1934 under the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. However, regulation and deregulation came in waves, with the deregulation of big business in the Gilded Age leading to President Theodore Roosevelt's trust busting from 1901 to 1909, and deregulation and Laissez-Faire economics once again in the roaring 1920s leading to the Great Depression and intense governmental regulation and Keynesian economics under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal plan. President Ronald Reagan deregulated business in the 1980s with his Reaganomics plan.

In 1946, the U.S. Congress enacted the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which formalized means of assuring the regularity of government administrative activity, and its conformance with authorizing legislation. The APA established uniform procedures for a federal agency's promulgation of regulations, and adjudication of claims. The APA also sets forth the process for judicial review of agency action.

Regulatory capture

Regulatory capture is the process by which a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry that the agency is charged with regulating. The probability of regulatory capture is economically biased, in that vested interests in an industry have the greatest financial stake in regulatory activity and are more likely to be motivated to influence the regulatory body than dispersed individual consumers, each of whom has little particular incentive to try to influence regulators. Thus the likelihood of regulatory capture is a risk to which an agency is exposed by its very nature.[1]

Theories of regulation

The development and techniques of regulations have long been the subject of academic research, particularly in the utilities sector. Two basic schools of thought have emerged on regulatory policy, namely, positive theories of regulation and normative theories of regulation.

Positive theories of regulation examine why regulation occurs. These theories of regulation include theories of market power, interest group theories that describe stakeholders' interests in regulation, and theories of government opportunism that describe why restrictions on government discretion may be necessary for the sector to provide efficient services for customers. In general, the conclusions of these theories are that regulation occurs because:

  1. the government is interested in overcoming information asymmetries with the operator and in aligning the operator's interest with the government's interest,
  2. customers desire protection from market power when competition is non-existent or ineffective,
  3. operators desire protection from rivals, or
  4. operators desire protection from government opportunism.

Normative economic theories of regulation generally conclude that regulators should

  1. encourage competition where feasible,
  2. minimize the costs of information asymmetries by obtaining information and providing operators with incentives to improve their performance,
  3. provide for price structures that improve economic efficiency, and
  4. establish regulatory processes that provide for regulation under the law and independence, transparency, predictability, legitimacy, and credibility for the regulatory system.

Alternatively, many heterodox economists working outside the neoclassical tradition, such as in institutionalist economics, economic sociology and economic geography, as well as many legal scholars (especially of the legal realism and critical legal studies approaches) stress that market regulation is important for safeguarding against monopoly formation, the overall stability of markets, environmental harm, and to ensure a variety of social protections. These draw on a diverse range of sociologists of markets, including Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, Neil Fligstein, and Karl Marx as well as the learnt history of government institutions involved in regulatory processes.

Principal-agent theory addresses issues of information asymmetry, which in the context of utility regulation, generally means that the operator knows more about its abilities and effort and about the utility market than does the regulator. In this literature, the government is the principal and the operator is the agent, whether the operator is government owned or privately owned. Principal-agent theory is applied in incentive regulation and multipart tariffs.[2]

Regulatory metrics

The World Bank's Doing Business database collects data from 178 countries on the costs of regulation in certain areas, such as starting a business, employing workers, getting credit, and paying taxes. For example, it takes an average of 19 working days to start a business in the OECD, compared to 60 in Sub-Saharan Africa; the cost as a percentage of GNP (not including bribes) is 8% in the OECD, and 225% in Africa.

The Worldwide Governance Indicators project at the World Bank recognizes that regulations have a significant impact in the quality of governance of a country. The Regulatory Quality of a country, defined as "the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development"[3] is one of the six dimensions of governance that the Worldwide Governance Indicators measure for more than 200 countries.

Deregulation

Main article: Deregulation

During the late 1970s and 1980s, some forms of regulation were seen as imposing unnecessary 'red tape' and other restrictions on businesses. In particular, government support of cartel activity was seen as diminishing economic efficiency. Regulatory agencies were often seen as having been captured by the regulated industries, as a means of diminishing competition between industry participants, and so not serving the public interest. As a result, there has been a movement towards deregulation in a number of industries. These include transportation, communications, and some financial services.

One example is the international monetary system: it is now much easier to transfer capital between countries. As a result, the globalisation of markets has increased.

An accompaniment of deregulation has been 'privatisation' of industries that previously had been under government control. The hope was that market forces would make these industries more efficient. This program was widely pursued in Britain throughout the later years of the last century. Critics argue that although this has increased choice in services, their standards have declined and wages and employment have been reduced.

Some, particularly libertarians, feel there has been little progress in deregulation during recent decades, and controls on small businesses, for example, are greater than ever. They feel deregulation is an aspirational, rather than a real, intention.

Others support re-regulation on the basis that deregulation has gone too far and given too much power to corporations and special interests at the expense of the power of the people's elected representatives.

Many criticize the influence of Intellectual Property Rights and other sorts of national regulations on the internet and IT business (software patents, DRM, trusted computing).

Controversy

Proponents

The regulation of markets is to safeguard society and has been the mainstay of industrialized capitalist economic governance through the twentieth century. Karl Polanyi refers to this process as the 'embedding' of markets in society. Further, contemporary economic sociologists such as Neil Fligstein (in his 2001 Architecture of Markets) argue that markets depend on state regulation for their stability, resulting in a long term co-evolution of the state and markets in capitalist societies in the last two hundred years.

Opponents

There are various schools of economics that push for restrictions and limitations on governmental role in economic markets. Economists who advocate these policies do not necessarily share principles, such as Nobel prize-winning economists Milton Friedman (monetarist school), George Stigler (Chicago School of Economics / Neo-Classical Economics), and Friedrich Hayek (Austrian School of Economics), as well as Richard Posner (Chicago School / Pragmatism), all of whom have sought substantially to limit economic regulation. Generally, these schools attest that government needs to limit its involvement in economic sectors and focus instead on protecting negative individual rights (life, liberty, and property). These schools would assure economic rights equally, rather than diminish individual autonomy and responsibility for the sake of remedying any sort of putative "market failure." They tend to regard the notion of market failure as a misguided contrivance wrongly used to justify coercive government actions.

A recent comprehensive study of evidence on government regulation has supported the Iron Law of Regulation which claims “There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.”[4]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Gary Adams, Sharon Hayes, Stuart Weierter and John Boyd, "Regulatory Capture: Managing the Risk" ICE Australia, International Conferences and Events (PDF) (October 24, 2007). Retrieved April 14, 2011
  2. ↑ Body of Knowledge on Infrastructure regulation Theories of Regulation.
  3. ↑ "A Decade of Measuring the Quality of Governance" (PDF).
  4. ↑ Armstrong, J. Scott; Green, Kesten C. (2013). "Effects of corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility policies" (PDF). Journal of Business Research.

Further reading

External links

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