Transnational regulations, often established by private bodies, play a large and important role in the international political economy. This paper makes two contributions to the literature on transnational regulation. First, governments and international organization often legitimate the delegation of regulatory authority to transnational private bodies with efficiency gains. It is rare, however, that the alleged gains are empirically examined, which requires a comparative analysis vis-à-vis other regulatory regimes. I contrast rule-making for manufactured goods and financial reporting, where a single transnational private body is the clear focal point for rule-making at the international level, with purely domestic regulatory regimes and the prior attempts to establish international product and financial standards through negotiations between governments or public regulators. I show that the shift to transnational (private) regulation indeed brought real, substantial gains in the effectiveness and efficiency of rule-making. Second, I scrutinize the distributional consequences of transnational private regulation, which I submit are closely related to the efficiency gains. Here, the existing literature focuses on the distribution of the financial costs and benefits of specific rules among those who are the targets of such rules, given a particular regulatory regime. Institutional complementarity theory provides a powerful analytical framework for examining such distributional effects. In this paper, I push the framework further to examine the distributional consequences of the shift to transnational private regulation. I argue that this shift has persistent structural consequences for the relative power of a broad range of stakeholders (both within and across countries) and thus for their regulatory capabilities.

Transnational private regulation (TPR) is a growing phenomenon. It creates new markets and dissolves old ones. TPR contributes to the regulation of existing markets, it increases the protection of fundamental rights and it enables or disables communities to participate in global rule making. The standing of TPR and its role regulatory control continues to grow. TPR presents new characteristics departing from more conventional forms of domestic self-regulation. It reflects a transfer of regulatory power from the domestic to the transnational and from the public to the private sphere with significant distributional consequences. The Report addresses the development of transnational private regulation in three macro-areas: financial markets, consumer protection and fundamental rights. It encompasses 11 case studies focusing on four dimensions: legitimacy, quality, effectiveness and enforcement.

The Challenge of Transnational Private Regulation: Conceptual and Constitutional Debates presents an extensive treatment of the constitutional dimensions of transnational private regulation, including its sources of power and modes of accountability. Represents the first extensive treatment of the phenomenon of transnational private regulation Offers conceptual and theoretical innovation in considering the significance of transnational private regulation and its relationship to governmental activity in hybrid regimes Analyzes constitutional issues surrounding the emergence of transnational private regulation

Global private regulations—who wins, who loses, and why Over the past two decades, governments have delegated extensive regulatory authority to international private-sector organizations. This internationalization and privatization of rule making has been motivated not only by the economic benefits of common rules for global markets, but also by the realization that government regulators often lack the expertise and resources to deal with increasingly complex and urgent regulatory tasks. The New Global Rulers examines who writes the rules in international private organizations, as well as who wins, who loses--and why. Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli examine three powerful global private regulators: the International Accounting Standards Board, which develops financial reporting rules used by corporations in more than a hundred countries; and the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission, which account for 85 percent of all international product standards. Büthe and Mattli offer both a new framework for understanding global private regulation and detailed empirical analyses of such regulation based on multi-country, multi-industry business surveys. They find that global rule making by technical experts is highly political, and that even though rule making has shifted to the international level, domestic institutions remain crucial. Influence in this form of global private governance is not a function of the economic power of states, but of the ability of domestic standard-setters to provide timely information and speak with a single voice. Büthe and Mattli show how domestic institutions' abilities differ, particularly between the two main standardization players, the United States and Europe.

This book analyzes the mechanism of transnational private regulations (TPRs) in the global property investment market and the conditions of their effectiveness for sustainable urban development. In the present economy, with control over national legislation alone, state policymakers have been challenged to regulate transnational investors, markets, and issues such as global warming, financial crises, food safety risks, deforestation, and cross-border business transactions. Transgovernmental networks of regulators have assembled representatives and technical experts from national regulatory agencies, nongovernmental organizations, private firms, and business organizations. As private corporations become increasingly globalized, many forms of TPRs have emerged since the 1990s for legislation, standard-setting, monitoring of compliance, and implementation of transnational rules, to respond to challenges posed by the transformation of domestic and international regulatory environments. TPRs are self-regulated, non-state, market-driven regulations. Since the emergence of TPRs, the global rule-making landscape has become dynamic. Urban development and property investment have been viewed historically as local phenomena: The regulations and standards in this field have been established and enforced by governments, local associations, and national professional bodies. However, as urban development and property investment increasingly have been globalized, the services, transactions, and investments by private firms have transcended national boundaries. For this reason, it has become difficult for states to regulate global activities through existing national legislation or international regulatory systems. As the management of new transnational issues through collaborations between various actors is unpredictable, it is necessary to examine the mechanism of TPRs in global property investment and their effectiveness for sustainable urban development.

The past thirty years have witnessed a transformation of government economic intervention in broad segments of industry throughout the world. Many industries historically subject to economic price and entry controls have been largely deregulated, including natural gas, trucking, airlines, and commercial banking. However, recent concerns about market power in restructured electricity markets, airline industry instability amid chronic financial stress, and the challenges created by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed commercial banks to participate in investment banking, have led to calls for renewed market intervention. Economic Regulation and Its Reform collects research by a group of distinguished scholars who explore these and other issues surrounding government economic intervention. Determining the consequences of such intervention requires a careful assessment of the costs and benefits of imperfect regulation. Moreover, government interventions may take a variety of forms, from relatively nonintrusive performance-based regulations to more aggressive antitrust and competition policies and barriers to entry. This volume introduces the key issues surrounding economic regulation, provides an assessment of the economic effects of regulatory reforms over the past three decades, and examines how these insights bear on some of today’s most significant concerns in regulatory policy.

Regulation is often thought of as an activity that restricts behaviour and prevents the occurrence of certain undesirable activities, but the influence of regulation can also be enabling or facilitative, as when a market could potentially be chaotic if uncontrolled. This Handbook provides a clear and authoritative discussion of the major trends and issues in regulation over the last thirty years, together with an outline of prospective developments. It brings together contributions from leading scholars from a range of disciplines and countries. Each chapter offers a broad overview of key current issues and provides an analysis of different perspectives on those issues. Experiences in different jurisdictions and insights from various disciplines are drawn upon, and particular attention is paid to the challenges that are encountered when specific approaches are applied in practice. Contributors develop their own distinctive arguments relating to the central issues in regulation and apply scholarly rigour and clear writing to matters of high policy-relevance. The essays are original, accessible, and agenda-setting, and the Handbook will be essential reading both to students and researchers and to with regulatory and regulated professionals.