Purpose

This independent blog collects news about projects or achievements in regulatory reform / better regulation. It is edited by Charles H. Montin. All opinions expressed are given on a personal basis.
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15 November 2011

How does smart regulation support competitiveness?

While we all agree that regulatory reform directly contributes to a better regulatory environment for business, we rarely stop to examine how effective this contribution can be, and how it combines with other policies to improve a country's economic performance relative to its competitors. Your blogger was invited by the Chinese Taipei ministry of finance to investigate this topic for a roundtable with the vice-minister and senior staff of the ministry last month. The resulting presentation published online examines various academic contributions and national approaches to competitiveness, to ascertain the place of regulatory reform: in short regulatory competitiveness is one one of the three pillars of economic competitiveness with competition policy and the infrastructure policy. The detailed Powerpoint takes stock of the various stages of regulatory reform from deregulation to smart regulation and examines current varieties practiced by countries and international groups.
A worldwide tour of economic performance in national and intergovernemental policies shows inter alia that approaches come under different banners corresponding to governement priorities. Supported by the economic research of the Global Competitiveness Forum, several countries have set up competitiveness bodies (the European Commission, Sweden, Ireland and many others), while others prefer the more economically mainstream concept of productivity (following in the Australian model, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines and others). The US and India apply both concepts while Mauritius entrusts the two objectives to the same organisation. Other countries seem to believe that public policy should not interfere with the use of factors of production and prefer to seek growth and jobs primarily via other interventions: France and Germany favour making the administration more efficient, the UK emphasizes efficient markets with its Competition Commission. Most of the others closely watch the Doing Business index and make raising their ranking a national priority.

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