Regulation

Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields of biology and society, but the term has slightly different meanings according to context. For example:

in government, typically regulation (or its plural) refers to the delegated legislation which is adopted to enforce primary legislation; includes land-use regulation
in economy: regulatory economics
in finance: Financial regulation
in business, industry self-regulation occurs through self-regulatory organizations and trade associations which allow industries to set and enforce rules with less government involvement; and,
in biology, gene regulation and metabolic regulation allow living organisms to adapt to their environment and maintain homeostasis;
in psychology, self-regulation theory is the study of how individuals regulate their thoughts and behaviors to reach goals.

Social

Regulation in the social, political, psychological, and economic domains can take many forms: legal restrictions promulgated by a government authority, contractual obligations (for example, contracts between insurers and their insureds^[1]), self-regulation in psychology, social regulation (e.g. norms), co-regulation, third-party regulation, certification, accreditation or market regulation.^[2]

State-mandated regulation is government intervention in the private market in an attempt to implement policy and produce outcomes which might not otherwise occur,^[3] ranging from consumer protection to faster growth or technological advancement.

The regulations may prescribe or proscribe conduct ("command-and-control" regulation), calibrate incentives ("incentive" regulation), or change preferences ("preferences shaping" regulation). Common examples of regulation include limits on environmental pollution, laws against child labor or other employment regulations, minimum wages laws, regulations requiring truthful labelling of the ingredients in food and drugs, and food and drug safety regulations establishing minimum standards of testing and quality for what can be sold, and zoning and development approvals regulation. Much less common are controls on market entry, or price regulation.

One critical question in regulation is whether the regulator or government has sufficient information to make ex-ante regulation more efficient than ex-post liability for harm and whether industry self-regulation might be preferable.^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7] The economics of imposing or removing regulations relating to markets is analysed in empirical legal studies, law and economics, political science, environmental science, health economics, and regulatory economics.

Power to regulate should include the power to enforce regulatory decisions. Monitoring is an important tool used by national regulatory authorities in carrying out the regulated activities.^[8]

In some countries (in particular the Scandinavian countries) industrial relations are to a very high degree regulated by the labour market parties themselves (self-regulation) in contrast to state regulation of minimum wages etc.^[9]

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 and standardization declined with the Roman Empire, 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 regarding contracts.^[10]^: 5

Modern industrial regulation can be traced to the Railway Regulation Act 1844 in the United Kingdom, and succeeding Acts. Beginning in the late 19th and 20th centuries, 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 require experts in the industry to focus their attention on the issue. At the federal level, one of 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 clear life-cycles or patterns of behavior, and they 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 United States Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Measurement

Regulation can be assessed for different countries through various quantitative measures. The Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance^[11] by World Bank's Global Indicators Group scores 186 countries on transparency around proposed regulations, consultation on their content, the use of regulatory impact assessments^[12] and the access to enacted laws on a scale from 0 to 5. The V-Dem Democracy indices include the regulatory quality indicator.^[13] The QuantGov project^[14] at the Mercatus Center tracks the count of regulations by topic for United States, Canada, and Australia.

References

^ Marcos Antonio Mendoza, "Reinsurance as Governance: Governmental Risk Management Pools as a Case Study in the Governance Role Played by Reinsurance Institutions", 21 Conn. Ins. L.J. 53, (2014) https://ssrn.com/abstract=2573253
^ Levi-Faur, David, Regulation and Regulatory Governance, Jerusalem Papers in Regulation and Governance, No. 1, 2010
^ Orbach, Barak, What Is Regulation? 30 Yale Journal on Regulation Online 1 (2012)
^ Sim, Michael (2018). "Limited Liability and the Known Unknown". Duke Law Journal. 68: 275–332. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3121519. ISSN 1556-5068. S2CID 44186028 – via SSRN.
^ Schwarcz, Steven L. (2011). "Keynote & Chapman Dialogue Address: Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Approaches to Financial Regulation". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1748007. ISSN 1556-5068. S2CID 154354509.
^ Hosoe, Moriki (2020), "Ex-ante Regulation, Ex-post Regulation, and Collusion", Applied Economic Analysis of Information and Risk, Singapore: Springer Singapore, pp. 49–66, doi:10.1007/978-981-15-3300-6_4, ISBN 978-981-15-3299-3, S2CID 216306756, retrieved 2020-11-03
^ Shavell, Steven (October 1983). "Liability for Harm Versus Regulation of Safety". Cambridge, MA. doi:10.3386/w1218.
^ Eraldo Banovac. Monitoringgrundlagen der kroatischen Regulierungsbehörde für Energie. EW − das Magazin für die Energie Wirtschaft, Vol. 103, No. 1–2, 2004, pp. 14–16.
^ Anders Kjellberg (2017) "Self-regulation versus State Regulation in Swedish Industrial Relations" In Mia Rönnmar and Jenny Julén Votinius (eds.) Festskrift till Ann Numhauser-Henning. Lund: Juristförlaget i Lund 2017, pp. 357-383
^ John Braithwaite, Péter Drahos. (2000). Global Business Regulation. Cambridge University Press.
^ Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance
^ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2008), Introductory Handbook for Undertaking Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA), https://www.oecd.org/gov/regulatory-policy/44789472.pdf , retrieved 4/11/23.
^ Sigman, Rachel, and Staffan I. Lindberg. "Neopatrimonialism and democracy: An empirical investigation of Africa's political regimes." V-Dem Working Paper 56 (2017).
^ "QuantGov". quantgov.org. Retrieved June 4, 2023.