Laws and regulations affect the daily lives of businesses and citizens. High-quality laws promote national welfare and growth, while badly designed laws hinder growth, harm the environment and put the health of citizens at risk. This report analyses practices to improve the quality of laws ...

Regulatory impact assessment (RIA) is the main instrument used by governments and regulators to appraise the likely effects of their policy proposals. This pioneering Handbook provides a comparative and comprehensive account of this tool, situating it in the relevant theoretical traditions and scrutinizing its use across countries, policy sectors and policy instruments. Comprising six parts, university researchers, international consultants and practitioners working in international organizations examine regulatory impact assessment from many perspectives, which include: • research traditions in the social sciences • implementation, regulatory indicators and effects • tools and dimensions such as courts and gender • sectoral case studies including environment, enterprise and international development • international diffusion in the European Union (EU), Americas, Asia and developing countries • appraisal, training and education. With its wealth of detail and lessons to be learned, the Handbook of Regulatory Impact Assessment will undoubtedly be of great value to practitioners and scholars working in governance, political science and socio-legal studies.

The importance of ex ante and ex post impact assessment in streamlining the regulatory environment and improving the legislative process has been stressed by scholars and testified to by international best practices. The potential benefits of regulatory impact assessment are also being rediscovered by EU officials, who lose no chance to recall that the Commission's ambitious "growth and jobs" strategy heavily depends on the pervasiveness of impact assessment in the regulatory process at EU and member state level. This study, conceived for scholars and policymakers, provides an overview of the state of the art on impact assessment. It focuses on the latest developments in the United States, UK, and EU, and presents a scorecard analysis of the Commission's extended impact assessments. The author concludes with a road map for improving the transparency, efficiency, and effectiveness of the EU Integrated Impact Assessment model.

This report encourages governments to “think big” about the relevance of regulatory policy and assesses the recent efforts of OECD countries to develop and deepen regulatory policy and governance.

This publication presents recent OECD papers on risk and regulatory policy. They offer measures for developing, or improving, coherent risk governance policies.

The goal of regulatory reform is to improve national economies and enhance their ability to adapt to change. Better regulation and structural reforms are necessary complements to sound fiscal and macroeconomic policies. Continual and far-reaching ...