Regulation Information

Regulation is administrative legislation that constitutes or constrains rights and allocates responsibilities. It can be distinguished from primary legislation (by Parliament or elected legislative body) on the one hand and judge-made law on the other. ^[1] Regulation can take many forms: legal restrictions promulgated by a government authority, self-regulation by an industry such as through a trade association, social regulation (e.g. norms), co-regulation, or market regulation. One can consider regulation as actions of conduct imposing sanctions, such as a fine, to the extent permitted by the law of the land. This action of administrative law, or implementing regulatory law, may be contrasted with statutory or case law.

Regulation mandated by a state attempts to produce outcomes which might not otherwise occur, produce or prevent outcomes in different places to what might otherwise occur, or produce or prevent outcomes in different timescales than would otherwise occur. In this way, regulations can be seen as implementation artifacts of policy statements. Common examples of regulation include controls on market entries, prices, wages, development approvals, pollution effects, employment for certain people in certain industries, standards of production for certain goods, the military forces and services. The economics of imposing or removing regulations relating to markets is analysed in regulatory economics.

Reasons for Regulation

Regulations, like any other form of coercive action, have costs for some and benefits for others. Efficient regulations are defined as those where the total benefits to some people exceed the total costs to others.

Regulations are justified using a variety of reasons and therefore can be classified in several broad categories:

• Market failures - regulation due to inefficiency. Intervention due to a classical economics argument to market failure.
  • Risk of monopoly
  • Collective action, or public good
  • Inadequate information
  • Unseen externalities
• Collective desires - regulation about collective desires or considered judgments on the part of a significant segment of society
• Diverse experiences - regulation with a view of eliminating or enhancing opportunities for the formation of diverse preferences and beliefs
• Social subordination - regulation aimed to increase or reduce social subordination of various social groups
• Endogenous preferences - regulation's purpose is to affect the development of certain preferences on an aggregate level
• Irreversibility - regulation that deals with the problem of irreversibility – the problem in which a certain type of conduct from current generations results in outcomes from which future generations may not recover from at all.
• Professional conduct - the regulation of members of professional bodies, either acting under statutory or contractual powers.^[2]
• Interest group transfers - regulation that results from efforts by self-interest groups to redistribute wealth in their favor, which may be disguised as one or more of the justifications above.

The study of formal (legal and/or official) and informal (extera-legal and/or unofficial) regulation constitutes one of the central concerns of the Sociology of law. Legal sociologists have in particular been interested in exploring the limits of formal and legal regulation in changing patterns of social behaviour.

History

Regulation of businesses existed in the ancient early Egyptian, Indian, Greek, and Roman civilizations. Standardized weights and measures existed to an extent in the ancient world, and gold may have operated to some degree as an international currency. In China, a national currency system existed and paper currency was invented. Sophisticated law existed in Ancient Rome. In the European Early Middle Ages, law, standardization, and the power of the after the decline of Rome, but regulation existed in the form of norms, customs, and privileges; this regulation was aided by the unified Christian identity and a sense of honor in regard to contracts.^[3]:5

Beginning in the late 19th and 20th century, much of regulation in the United States was administered and enforced by regulatory agencies which produced their own administrative law and procedures under the authority of statutes. Legislators created these agencies to allow experts in the industry to focus their attention on the issue. At the federal level, one the earliest institutions was the Interstate Commerce Commission which had its roots in earlier state-based regulatory commissions and agencies. Later agencies include the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, Civil Aeronautics Board, and various other institutions. These institutions vary from industry to industry and at the federal and state level. Individual agencies do not necessarily have a clear life-cycle and patterns of behavior, and are influenced heavily by their leadership and staff as well as the organic law creating the agency. In the 1930s, lawmakers believed that unregulated business often led to injustice and inefficiency; in the 1960s and 1970s, concern shifted to regulatory capture, which led to extremely detailed laws creating the Environmental Protection Administration and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Deregulation, regulatory reform and liberalization

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the cost to the economy of government regulation in the United States is approximately $1.75 trillion per year, which exceeds all corporate pretax profits put together.^[4] Although some regulations are clearly beneficial, the benefits of others are much less clear. There have been ongoing programs to review regulatory initiatives with a view to minimizing, simplifying, and making more cost effective regulations. Such efforts, given impetus by the Regulatory Flexibility Act of 1980 in the United States, are embodied in the United States Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and the United Kingdom's Better Regulation Commission. Cost-benefit analysis is frequently used in such reviews. In addition, there have been regulatory innovations, usually suggested by economists, such as emissions trading. Academic research on wedding economic theory with regulatory activity continues.

See also

• Rulemaking
• Rule of law
• Regulatory State
• Sociology of law
• Delegated legislation
• Deregulation
• Desoligolipolization
• Development approvals
• Federal Register
• Public administration
• Public choice theory
• Regulator (disambiguation)
• Rule According to Higher Law
• Regulatory capture
• Cybernetics
• Bootleggers and Baptists
• Code of Federal Regulations
• Constitutional economics

References

1. ^ Levi-Faur, David, Regulation and Regulatory Governance, Jerusalem Papers in Regulation and Governance, No.1, 20101
2. ^ Harris, Brian; Andrew Carnes (February 2011). Disciplinary and Regulatory Proceedings. Jordans. ISBN 978-1-84661-270-1.
3. ^ John Braithwaite, Péter Drahos. (2000). Global Business Regulation. Cambridge University Press.
4. ^ Murray, Iain. "There Is No ‘Regulation Day’ to Remind Us How Much They Cost". National Review. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/264984/there-no-regulation-day-remind-us-how-much-they-cost-iain-murray. Retrieved 10 March 2012.

External links

• Centre on Regulation in Europe (CERRE)
• The Regulatory Law Review
• New Perspectives on Regulation (2009) and Government and Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation (2009)
• US/Canadian Regulatory Cooperation: Schmitz on Lessons from the European Union, Canadian Privy Council Office Commissioned Study
• OECD - Why a Global Standard for a stronger, cleaner, fairer economy?
• The New Regulatory Era -- An Introduction, Arizona Law Review (2009): By Barak Orbach
• RegState.net: Orbach on Regulation
• A Comparative Bibliography: Regulatory Competition on Corporate Law
• Regulation & Governance, A Journal dedicated for the study of Regulation
• Reports of UK practice from the Better Regulation Commission
• United Kingdom deregulatory procedures
• An Introduction to Regulation
• Regulation updates service on the UK government Business Link website
• ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory Governance
• Regulatory Studies Program at George Mason University
• ReguStand dedicated for helping SMEs manage regulation
• Regulatory law in the UK
• ICTs, Markets and Regulation
• Center for Financial Market Regulation
• Body of Knowledge on Infrastructure Regulation
• Penn Program on Regulation

Wikibooks

• Legal and Regulatory Issues in the Information Economy
• Lawrence A. Cunningham, A Prescription to Retire the Rhetoric of 'Principles-Based Systems' in Corporate Law, Securities Regulation and Accounting (2007)

Categories:

• Administrative law
• Economics of regulation
• Legal research

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